
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chn^-p.Ji..^ uopyright No. 



Slielt_.<lEi. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERJCA. 



"LIFE" SERIES. 

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his 

glowing hands ; 
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden 

sands. 

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the 

chords with might; 
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in 

music out of sight. 



"LIFE'' SERIES. 

^#- 

Lowell Times. —ThQ books are very beautiful, and 
excellently adapted for simple gifts. Their value, 
however, is in their contents: self- development, 
helpfulness, unselfishness, great-hearted manliness. 

The House Beautiful^ By William C. Gannett, 

As Natural as Life^ By Charles G. Ames. 

In Love with Love^ By James H. West. 

A Child of Nature, By Marion D. Shutter. 

Power and Use, By John W. Chad wick. 

Being and Doing, By Various Authors. 

'Farther On, By Various Authors. 

Love Does It All, By Ida Lemon Hildyard. 

Baltimoi^e American. — There is a strengthening, 
tranquil, uplifting power in these little books that 
makes one cherish for them, when they have been 
enjoyed and laid aside, the warm, grateful senti- 
ment with which we treasure dear friends. 

Cloth, beveled, neatly stamped, each 60 cents. 

Special white and gold edition, fnll gilt edges, in box, 

each '/J cents. 

Descriptive circular on application. 

^- 

*#* For sale by booksellers, or sent, postpaid, on 
receipt of price, by 

JAMES H. WEST, Publisher, Boston, Mass. 



/ 

FARTHER ON 



FIVE LIFE -STUDIES 



E. H. Chapin, James Vila Blake, 

MiNOT J. Savage, W. L. Sheldon, 

Philip S. Thachee. 




BOSTON ^^>5^ ^f ^^:^?i^r'^ '^" 



James H. West, Publishes L%^1^ 
174 High Street 



.C'l C 



1^ 



TWO CnriES B^CElVED 






COPYRiaHT, 1897, 

By JAMES H. WEST. 



Angels of Growth ! of old, in the surprise 
Of your first vision, wild and sweet, 

I poured in passionate sighs my wish unwise 
That ye descend my heart to meet, — 

My heart so slow to rise ! 

Now thus I pray: — Angelic be to hold 
In heaven your shining poise afar, 

And to my wishes bold reply with cold 
Sweet invitation, like a star 

Fixed in the heavens old. 

Did ye descend, what were ye more than I ? 

Is't not by this ye are divine — 
That, native to the sky, ye cannot hie 

Downward and give low hearts the wine 
That should reward the high ? 

Not to content our lowness, but to lure 

And lift us to your angelhood, 
Do your surprises pure dawn far and sure 

Above the tumult of our blood, 
And starlike there endure I 

Wait there, — wait, and invite me while I climb ; 

For, see, I come ! — but slow, but slow ! 
Yet ever as your chime, soft and sublime, 

Lifts at my feet, they move, they go 
Up the great stair of time. 

— David A, Wasson, 



With Seeing Eye, and conscience true, 

Still Doing What We Can, 
The Happy Life comes full in view. 

For childhood and for man. 
And then, as Wisdom's lore we trace. 

And Nature's beauty con. 
Life's meaning looks us in the face, — 

Soul daily Farther On. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The SEEiNa Eye 7 

By E. H. Chapin, 

Doing What We Can 29 

By James Vila Blake. 

The Happy Life 61 

By MiNOT J. Sayage. 

Novel-Keading 75 

By W. L. Sheldok. 

The Sight of Natuee . 99 

By Philip S. Thaoher. 



THE SEEING EYE. 



E. h: Chapin. 



I saw the beauty of the world 
Before me like a flag unfurled, 
The splendor of the morning sky 
And all the stars in company : 
I thought, How beautiful it is ! — 

My soul said, There is more than this. 

Sometimes I have an awful thought 
That bids me do the thing I ought : 
It comes like wind, it burns like flame, — 
How shall I give that thought a name ? 
It draws me like a loving kiss : 

My soul says, There is more than this. 

I dreamed an angel of the Lord, 
With purple wings and golden sword, 
And such a splendor in his face 
As made a glory in the place : 
I thought, How beautiful he is I 

My soul said, There is more than this. 

That angel's Lord I cannot see 

Or hear, but he is Lord to me ; 

And in the heavens and earth and skies, 

The good which lives till evil dies. 

The love which I can not withstand, 

God writes his name with his own hand. 

-— TT. jB. Bands. 
(6) 



THE SEEING EYE. 

"Air, — I want air, and sunshine, and blue sky. 
The feeling of the breeze upon my face. 
The feeling of the turf beneath my feet, 
And no walls but the far-off mountain-tops." 

— Longfellow, 

** ' There's quiet in that angel's glance; 
There's rest in that still countenance.' 

*'*Be still, and know that I am God,' the Mighty 
Presence seems to say, voicing itself in surgings of 
the mountain pines, or in the cataract's thunder, or 
in the still small voice of birds, or in the silence of 
the night." — John W, Chadwick, 

'' Oh, glad am I that I was born I 
^ For who is sad when flaming morn 
Bursts forth, or when the mighty night 
Carries the soul from height to height I 

** To me, as to the child that sings, — 
The bird that claps his rain-washed wings, 
The breeze that curls the sun-tipt flower, — 
Comes some new joy with each new hour: 



5 THE SEEING ETB. 

** Joy in tlie beauty of the earth; 
Joy in the fire upon the hearth; 
Joy in the potency of love 
In which I live and breathe and move; 

** Joy even in the shapeless thought 
That, some day, when all tasks are wrought, 
I shall explore the vasty deep 
Beyond the frozen gates of sleep." 

— Harriet Prescott Spofford. 

THE grandest revelations of life and nature 
are infolded in the most familiar facts. 
He who has found no lofty suggestion in 
traversing the entire firmament may yet gain 
something in studying that wonderful instru- 
ment of sight, the human eye. Consider what 
instances of skill we gaze at with admiration, 
and cross oceans to behold, and yet how im- 
perfect and clumsy they are compared with 
this little compact organ set in its bony cup, 
with its lenses and regulators and pulleys and 
screws, its curtaining iris and its crystal deep, 
its inner chamber of imagery on which are 
flung the pictures of the universe, — the aspects 
of nature, the shapes of art, the symbols of 
knowledge, the faces of love ; this magic glass, 
both telescope and microscope, filled with the 



THE SEEING EYE. 9 

splendors of an insect's wing, yet taking in 
the scenery of heaven; this sentinel of the 
passions; this signal of the conscious soul, 
kindled by a light within more glorious than 
the light without, and never satisfied with 
seeing. 

Such is the human eye. And from the lowest 
creatures, whose visual apparatus is a mere 
nervous speck, up to thle most complex organ- 
isms, there is nothing that has the range of this 
organ. In certain specialties of vision man 
may not be equal to some animals or insects. 
The shark and the spider, the hawk and the 
cat, may see better on some particular plane 
of sight ; but in that general power which far 
transcends any special capacity, in scope, in 
possibility, in educated faculty, in expressive- 
ness, the human eye excels all others. 

If, then, superior qualifications are to be 
taken as proof of superior purpose, this fact 
of itself is significant as to the dignity and 
the destiny of man. We need no better refuta- 
tion of sceptical theories, no other attestation 
of sublime hopes, than this crystal globe of 
vision, — the astronomer's eye, for instance, 
wandering over the remotest fields of light; 



10 THE SEEING EYE. 

the artist's eye, catching the subtle beauty of 
nature ; the eye of love and devotion, recogniz- 
ing the presence and the touch of the all- 
pervading spirit. 

But in this line of argument nothing seems 
more suggestive than the statement in Ecclesi- 
astes, "The eye is not satisfied with seeing/' 
Now, so far as we can judge, the merely animal 
eye is satisfied with seeing. The brute does 
not shift about to get better views of nature. 
He does not search the landscape for objects 
of beauty and sublimity. The ox grazes con- 
tentedly in his pasture, and seeks nothing 
beyond the promise of his food. In darkness, 
says the Psalmist, "all the beasts of the forest 
do creep forth," roaring " after their prey,'' and 
"seeking their meat from God." But when "the 
sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, 
and lay them down in their dens." It is man 
only who " goes forth unto his work and to his 
labor until the evening." It is man only who 
finds in the opportunities of vision the inspira- 
tion of action, and in all that lies under the 
sun secures employment for a restless curiosity. 
He ponders unfathomable problems in the 
pebble and the weed, and eagerly searches the 



THE SEEING EYE. H 

secrets of the universe. How much, of human 
enterprise is simply the result of a longing for 
vision, — the desire to see strange lands and 
look upon memorable faces, to watch the evolu- 
tion of facts, and detect hidden causes ! No 
man is satisfied with that which he sees right 
around him. The child longs to know what lies 
beyond the hills that bound his familiar valley, 
into what strange country the sun goes down, 
and upon what marvelous region the rainbow 
rests. The schoolboy quits playing with the 
pebbles and the surf, to wonder about other 
shores across the wide, gray sea, and gazes wist- 
fully at the gilded sails away out on the horizon. 
And here, as in other things, "The child is 
father to the man.'^ Ever straining beyond the 
visible limit, ever exploring some depth or 
height, "the eye is not satisfied with seeing.'^ 
In the healthy working of the faculties, it is 
never weary of the opening day, never indiffer- 
ent to the promise of something new. Doubt- 
less there are nobler motives than curiosity 
leading men to the ends of the earth. But how 
much heroism and achievement does that single 
passion of curiosity itself inspire ! In its grat- 
ification, over what a grand scale of diversities, 



12 THE SEEING EYE. 

making up the world-wide harmony, does the 
eye of man sweep, until the earth lies unrolled 
in the traveler's memory, like a sheet of choral 
music. From the West to the East, whatever 
the sun reveals as it flashes upon the rim of the 
wheeling earth ; from the South to the North, 
where the sun burns above the horizon for one 
long summer's day, where it hides in the dark- 
ness of polar night; wherever the white wake of 
ships encircles the globe like a chain ; wherever 
man's foot may cling or his hand may hold, from 
the depths of primeval darkness and the heat of 
central fire, away above the path of the eagle, 
where the voice grows faint in the thin upper 
air, — so does the grand panorama unroll itself 
before the unsatisfied eye, — tracts of brown 
desert and intervals of rolling green, snow- 
capped mountains at whose feet lie billows of 
yellow corn and purple grapes, clots of teeming 
cities as motley as their men, spots of unpro- 
faned grandeur almost holy in their solitude, — 
the poles and antipodes, the burning cone of 
Cotopaxi and the monotony of Arabian sands. 

The eye, however, is not satisfied with its 
own natural limits, but seeks the aid of instru- 
ments. As, in its aspects, it is the most striking 



THE SEEING EYE. 13 

of all the organs of sense, so does it transcend 
them all in its scope, both of space and time. 
This little orb of observation, turning on its 
minute axis, sweeps the splendid theatre of suns 
and systems, comprehending millions of miles 
in a glance, and is visited by rays of light that 
have been traveling downwards for thousands 
of years. 

There is a suggestive fact here involved, 
which, when we duly consider it, comes to us 
with quickening force, — the fact that this in- 
satiable curiosity is characteristic of man alone, 
and that so much of his time and his effort 
should be devoted to the mere purpose of seeing. 
Whether the upshot be all vanity and vexation 
of spirit, or whether it lead to substantial 
results, the fact itself is none the less sug- 
gestive. 

What is it that is not satisfied with seeing ? 
In no scale of created being, — not even the 
lowest, — is it the eye itself that sees. It is 
the instinct, or consciousness , back of the eye. 
Examine the dead organ in man or animal, and 
all its wondrous mechanism is there. Lift the 
fallen lid, and the light of the outward world 
flickers upon its surface. But the faculty of 



14 THE SEEIlSrG EYE. 

sight is not there. The power that, back of 
retina and optic nerve, and far within the mys- 
terious chamber of the brain, actually saw and 
apprehended the visible forms of things, — this 
has vanished. Whatever that faculty may be 
in the brute, we have seen that in man it is a 
peculiar and distinctive faculty. We have seen 
that to him belongs this desire for vision, — this 
pushing inquisitiveness that is never satisfied. 
Such, then, must be the inner and conscious 
nature of man. Such must be the mysterious 
power behind the eye, — the thing that really 
sees. Therefore the eye that is not satisfied 
with seeing is the spirit within us. The outer 
organ is only its factor, or representative. The 
mind of man is the eye of man. And it is 
because of the limitless nature of the human 
soul that the eye of man never rests, but per- 
petually wanders over all the visible world, over 
all the regions of possible truth and beauty. 
Surely, if this were merely a mortal and limited 
nature, this would not be. Man would be satis- 
fied with seeing, even as the brute, adjusted to 
his only sphere, is satisfied with seeing ; and he 
would be content with the scope of the visible 
and the present. The fact that he is not thus 



THE SEEING EYE. 15 

content suggests that for him there is something 
more than the visible and the present, — a higher 
than any mere earthly destiny, — a nobler than 
any mere animal function. 

Consider what it is that the physical eye itself 
implies, I would not urge any presumptuous 
theory of final causes. I would not attempt to 
decide what any one thing is absolutely made 
for, nor overlook its relations to all other things 
as part of a grand and complex whole. But an 
examination of this mechanism alone — these 
cups, these tissues, these muscles, these elastic 
veils — shows at least that the eye is adjusted 
to the conditions of the external world, and that 
there are external things for it to behold. So 
much, I repeat, the physical eye implies. But, 
this being so, I ask. What is implied by that 
consciousness which acts behind the physical 
organ, — that faculty which really sees, and is 
never satisfied ? I have said that the Tnind of 
man is the eye of man ; and I ask. What does 
that restless mind itself, with its capacities and 
instincts, imply? Surely it implies the exist- 
ence of objects fitted to those capacities and 
instincts, — the existence of unlimited truth and 
beauty and goodness, and a field of deathless 



16 THE SEEIIfG ETE. 

activity for that faculty which is never satisfied. 
In this peculiarity of man, — in this mounting 
restlessness and boundless desire, — I trace a 
power which, though it may often be prompted 
by a vain curiosity, and seek trivial gratifica- 
tions, nevertheless bea.rs the stamp of an irre- 
pressible quality and endless life. 

For now that we have arrived at the fact that 
it is really the mind that sees, — the mind itself 
that is the unsatisfied eye, — we find that not 
only is it unsatisfied with any limit to its 
material vision, but it is not satisfied with the 
mere forms of things. Back of iris and retina 
there are other lenses. There is a lens of 
instinct, a lens of reason, a lens of faith, through 
which come reflections far beyond the visible 
veil of earth and heaven, images of ideal 
majesty and loveliness, and 

''A light that never was on sea or land." 

Are these mere fantasies engendered from 
within? If so, I ask. What do these interior 
lenses imply ? And why do they exist at all ? 
In the dead organ^, even as it lies useless in the 
socket, we find demonstration of a visual 
purpose. We infer real objects without, to 



THE SEEI]>fG EYE. 17 

which it was made to correspond, or, at least, to 
which it has been adjusted. What, then, must 
we infer from this mechanism of spiritual con- 
sciousness, — the faculty that really sees, — when 
we find it adapted to spiritual realities ? What 
can we infer, but that in the wide realm of 
actual being there are spiritual objects which 
answer to its function ? For the mind, and not 
the body, being the real eye, the faculty of 
looking out upon material forms is only one of 
its functions. This faith-vision, this preception 
of reason, is just as truly an original faculty, 
although now its objects may be seen only as 
"through a glass darbly.^^ In fact, with the 
physical eye we never do see things, — only the 
reflection of things. You never really saw the 
most familiar object. You never gazed upon 
your mother's face, or the expression of your 
child. We have only portraits of the dearest 
frieiids hung in the marvelous gallery of the 
eye. Yet we do not distrust these transmitted 
images. We live in their light, and rejoice in 
their communion. Why, then, distrust these 
other conceptions, though they are but images 
also, and we may behold them only in that 
transparent world where the material lens shall 



18 THE SEEIIS^G EYE. 

be shattered, and we shall see as we never do 
here, — " face to face " ? "Why suppose these to 
be fantasies, any more than the mountains, the 
stars, the cataract with its awful beauty, the 
familiar form, the dear countenance with its 
enduring look of love? This apprehension of 
God as an inscrutable Essence, yet also a veri- 
table Presence ; this impression on the retina of 
the soul of those who have vanished from our 
material sight, but who still look upon us across 
the river of death; this picture-gallery of beloved 
ones, that enriches the chambers of the humblest 
mind, — are these but mists of fancy, or dreams 
of mortal sleep? I answer that they are as 
legitimate as any transcript of the outward 
world, only more indefinite, as all facts involved 
with the infinite and the immortal necessarily 
must be. They are revealed to the same eye as 
that which sees through the physical organ; 
their outlines lie as steadily and as undeniably 
upon its retina as do the outlines of material 
things. There are diseased eyes, and there are 
defective eyes, by which the optic nerve brings 
false reports, upon which the outward world 
looks grim and obscure, to which all external 
things are a blank. So, too, there may be 



THE SEEING EYE. 19 

diseased and defective souls, whose images of 
spiritual things are fantastic and exaggerated, 
or whose vision is sealed altogether by sad, 
interior blindness. But these do not impeach 
the legitimate function of the eye, nor refute 
the general convictions of men. And these 
conceptions of God and immortality do not 
belong to the category of personal conceits. In 
one form or another their outlines stand pictured 
on the common soul of man, — the soul of the 
child, the savage, the saint, the philosopher. 

This is not a fanciful analogy, — a play upon 
words. It is an argument. I maintain that 
these other lenses of the mind — which is the 
faculty that really sees — imply corresponding 
objects as veritably as the mechanism of the 
physical eye implies corresponding objects. I 
maintain that these images that hang upon the 
retina of the soul are as surely the reflections of 
realities as those which linger on the tissues of 
the material organ ; in fine, that as the mind is 
not satisfied with seeing the mere material form 
of things, but seeks and discerns something 
behind and above them all, it follows that such 
a transcendent region actually exists. 

Moreover, as this faculty of vision that permits 



20 THE SEEING EYE. 

no limit to its material discoveries, and looks 
beyond these sensuous veils, is never satisfied 
with seeing, I ask. What does this fact itself 
imply? Surely it suggests boundless oppor- 
tunities of action. The desire to see is never 
quenched : nevertheless the mere physical organ 
of sight grows weary, and gladly retreats under 
its drowsy lids. The dew of sleep is required 
for its refreshment, and the periods of darkness 
indicate a necessary suspension of its work. 
Age draws over it a filmy curtain. " They that 
look out of the windows are darkened,'' says the 
author of Ecclesiastes, describing in an impres- 
sive figure that season when man's citizenship 
in this lower world draws to a close, and he is 
to be released from his labor among visible 
things. And so comes Death, shutting up the 
worn-out casements, and bringing on the final 
night when all this curious mechanism is re- 
solved into its elements. But the actual eye is 
not yet satisfied with seeing, and the forces that 
shatter its material instruments do not quench 
its capacity or its yearning. But no capacity is 
without its sphere, no instinct is forever balked. 
The unsatisfied eye demonstrates the deathless 
and ever-unfolding mind. 



THE SEEIISTG EYE. 



21 



An important point is here to be considered. 
I have illustrated a general condition of human- 
ity. No man is satisfied with seeing. All men 
manifest this unlimited desire. But certainly 
all men do not manifest this in the same degree. 
With some it is faint and fitful. Therefore, in 
perfect consistency with what has been said, I 
also urge this truth, — that the eye sees more 
and more, and more and more shows its capacity 
for seeing, in proportion as it becomes accus- 
tomed to worthy objects. There may be diver- 
sities of spiritual, as there are diversities of 
physical faculty. Consider what some men will 
train their natural eyes to behold, — the sailor 
at the mast-head, the Indian in the woods, the 
Esquimaux among the snows. The visual 
faculty of every man may not be capable of 
such refinement, and yet the eye of any man 
may be trained to greater skill. And so there 
are diversities of spiritual sight, some of them 
perhaps resulting from original differences in 
power. But the spiritual vision of any man 
may be educated to still better results. Some 
men hardly see anything with the interior eye, 
or, rather, with the interior lens of the eye, 
which is the mind. Living among scenes of 



22 THE SEEING EYE. 

wonder and of beauty, — among the ancient 
miracles of nature, — to such, a man there is 
nothing but common earth and sky, — a barom- 
eter for the weather, or a field for crops. 

*'A primrose by the river's brim 
A yellow primrose is to him, 
And it is nothing more." 

But to the eyes of some other it is much 
more, and everything exhibits something else 
than its material expression or worldly use. 
Each opening morning comes like new-born life, 
^^ trailing glory'' from the Creator's hand. One 
reason why men have not this spiritual discern- 
ment is because they will not see, because they 
neglect the faculty of seeing. It has been truly 
said that " the eye sees only that which it brings 
the power to see." It does not create the thing 
to be seen, any more than the microscope creates 
the pomp of an insect's wing, or Eosse's tube 
the splendors of Orion. But we see just what 
we exercise the power to see ; and no external 
revelations, however urged upon us, will make 
up for the lack of spiritual refinement. If you 
would see more things and better things, educate 
the eye. Educate the physical eye if you would 



THE SEEING EYE. 23 

see more of the natural world. But, even then, 
the mind must be educated, if we would discern 
the glory and the beauty everywhere, and live 
in a world of perpetual delight, detecting a 
rarer loveliness in the daisy, and pictures of 
wondrous grandeur in the shadows that drift 
along the mountain. It is not merely far trav- 
eling that enlarges and enriches the vision. 
Humboldt may have seen no more than a 
thousand other men who have been roving over 
the earth; but he saw better. The observant 
philosopher discovers a world of wonders in 
^^ a tour around his garden.^^ All this tends to 
the point, that the eye of the soul be educated, — 
the interior faculty which in reality does all the 
seeing. 

Let the eye of the soul be educated if you 
would see the world in new relations, if you 
would detect the true significance of life, if you 
would discern the real blessedness of every joy 
and the right look of every affliction, if you 
would stand consciously in the presence of God, 
and gaze upon spiritual things. Then you will 
see these realities where they are, nor wait for 
the opening of the crystal gates to discern what 
mere material vision can never behold. 



24 



THE SEEING EYE. 



It is an old truth, but as true as it is old, that 
"none are so blind as those who won't see/' 
What we really need is not more things, but 
better eyesight. And is it not this eye of the 
soul that we must mainly rely upon ? How far 
will physical sight guide us ? How long will it 
last us ? How much will it enable us to see ? 
At best it gives us only appearances, and itself 
fades and grows dim ere long. Think, then, 
of the desolation of those who have no interior 
vision. How light, comparatively, has been the 
affliction of physical blindness to men like 
Niebuhr, who, when the veil had fallen upon 
present things, could cheer the darkness of his 
closing years by retracing in the luminous track 
of memory the scenes of early travel; or to 
Milton, who, "with that inner eye which no 
calamity could darken," saw "those ethereal 
virtues flinging down on the jasper pavement 
their crowns of amaranth and gold.'' But "if 
the light that is in thee be darkness, how great 
is that darkness ! " In fact, a man's spiritual 
state may be tested by what he sees, by the way 
in which the world, and the things that are in 
the world, look to him. Men saw no comeliness 
in Jesus: they discerned not the aspect of 



THE SEEING EYE. 25 

divine truth, because they themselves "were 
not of the truth/^ Pray, then, for light, as of 
old those blind men by the wayside prayed, 
"Lord, that our eyes may be opened!^' 

We are in this world to see. Glorious are the 
revelations of material things to the material 
eye; but far more glorious are the revelations 
made to the eye within. And yet, within the 
limitations of our present state, even these are 
not enough for us. Is it not a very suggestive 
fact? Trained to discern all this excellence, 
the eye is not satisfied with seeing. It is meant 
that it never shall be satisfied, here and now. 
The eye, by this very communion with spiritual 
objects, is educated to a larger capacity and a 
nobler desire ; and so passes onward, unsatisfied 
still, beyond the veil, to see more and more of 
the perfection of God, but, never satisfied with 
seeing, to push its perception still onward and 
upward, while the point of present attainment 
will ever be the signal of new possibility and 
perpetual aspiration. 

'*Kothmg resting in its own completeness 
Can have worth or beauty: but alone 
Because it leads and tends to farther sweetness, 
Fuller, higher, deeper than its own. 



26 THE SEEING EYE. 

** Spring's real glory dwells not in the meaning, 
Gracious though it be, of her blue hours ; 
But is hidden in her tender leaning 
To the Summer's richer wealth of flowers. 

"Dawn is fair, because the mists fade slowly 
Into Day, which floods the world with light; 
Twilight's mystery is sweet and holy 
Just because it ends in starry Night. 

** Childhood's smiles unconscious graces borrow 
From Strife that in a far-off future lies ; 
And angel-glances, veiled now by life's sorrow, 
Draw our hearts to some beloved eyes. 

" Life is only bright when it proceedeth 
Toward a truer, deeper life above ; 
Human love is sweetest when it leadeth 
To a more divine and perfect love. 

' * Dare not to blame earth' s gifts for incompleteness ; 
In that want their beauty lies : they roll 
Towards some inflnite depth of love and sweetness, 
Bearing onward man's reluctant soul." 




DOING WHAT WE CAN. 

BY / 

Jambs Vila Blakb. 



We fare on earth as other men have fared. 
Were they successful ? — let us not despair. 
Was disappointment oft their sole reward ? 
Yet shall their tale instruct, if it declare 
How they have borne the load ourselves are doomed 
to bear. — James Beattie, 

Then said his Lordship, ''Well, God mend all!" 
"Nay, Donald, we must help him to mend it," said 
the other. — Quoted by Carlyle, 

Kouse to some high and holy work of love, 
And thou an angel's happiness shalt know; 
The good begun by thee while here below 
Shall like a river run, and broader flow." 

— Anon. 

I can believe, it shall you grieve, 

And somewhat you distrain, 
But afterward, your sufferance hard, 

Within a day or twain, 
Shall soon aslake ; and ye shall take 
Comfort to you again. 

— Old English Ballad, 
(28) 



DOING WHAT WE CAN. 



'T^HEKE is a Bible phrase which, says, ^^Be 
^ perfected.^^ The Greek word so translated 
means to make ready, to put fully in order, to 
complete ; primarily of things broken or injured, 
meaning to mend; then of persons in error, 
meaning to restore, to set right, to bring to that 
proper state which one should be in. The phrase 
signifies, plainly, to be brought from an erring 
or imperfect to a restored or completed or per- 
fected state. 

To be perfected, in the sense here understood, 
is to come from the imperfect to or towards the 
perfect ; from a low place to a high one. It is 
a restoring, or leading out, of what has a better 
aim or nature than now it shows, having gone 
wrong. Let us not be hopeless or too much cast 



30 DOING WHAT WE CAN. 

down then, or, least of all, beaten and bruised 
out of all effort, if we begin low or have done 
ill ; for it is to us very ones that it is written. 
Be perfected! — that is, be restored, or led on- 
ward, to what you by nature are like, and become 
your own true selves. 

This is different from the doctrine of '' regen- 
eration'^ as usually taught; which is that by 
nature we are bad and must be rectified by a 
triumph over nature, a revolution in us, whereby 
we become different from our human constitution 
and opposite to it. But rather, to ^^be perfected" 
means, in the phrase we are considering, to be 
restored, or completed. That is, if restored, re- 
paired, mended, then brought to our unbroken 
and proper natural state, from which we have 
retrograded ; and if completed, then made to go 
on from a low estate to a higher condition which 
is the true and natural issue ^nd eventuation 
of us. 

But it may be said. We are bidden to be per- 
fect: is this not a terrible command ? No; but 
easy and natural. For it means to restore, to 
complete; which is simply to build us up to 
our natural stature: which surely must mean 



DOING WHAT WE CAN. 31 

something that no one will find impossible or 
terrible. 

Moreover, since it is our natural stature and 
belongs to us in the unity of things, all things 
will help us. We shall be moving in harmony 
with all. This is a very great point; for the 
moment a man shoulders an evil thing and under- 
takes to carry it, every thing is in his way and 
rubs against his load and pushes it this way and 
that, so that hardly he can stagger along under 
it at all; and assuredly sometime it will be 
struck or torn from him and thrown down. But 
if he be carrying a good thing, it is conformable 
to every thing he meets and to every force of 
Nature that he shall carry it. Nothing can be 
opposed to it except bad or mistaken men ; and 
certainly all Nature and all other men will be 
too much for the evil or the folly of the few 
bad men. 

What would you wish to have set forth as a 
command to us ? Any thing less than what our 
nature should revere and desire ? And should 
this be aught less than the perfect ? 

Thus "Be perfected ^^ is no terrible or burden- 
some command ; because it is of the essence of 
our worship. Blessed is it ! Our very substance 



32 DOING WHAT WE CAN. 

is that we can adore perf ectness, and only that. 
All Nature moves thereto, and only thereto. 
During all the aeons of the patience of God in 
creation, the earth has been moving thus, with 
all that has come to life on it. And the end and 
enthusiasm and adoration of each creature can 
be only the end and tendency of all Nature, 
namely, the Perfect. Therefore the command 
no more than recognizes the element and nature 
of worship in us, and ordains that we can set 
nothing before us less high than the holiness 
that is adorable and the truth that is supreme. 

Again, — consider : If a man be mending or 
restoring himself, or completing himself, he then 
is doing a perfecting thing, and indeed a thing 
perfect in itself. For, can a man do anything 
more perfect than to be in the process of mend- 
ing himself, or completing himself ?^ To be 
doing this, then, is itself a perfectness and an 
obedience to the command. This is growth! 
And to grow is to be perfect already in a most 
great and noble way ; for it is doing a perfect 
act and keeping up a perfect way and motion. 

But this growth of us can not be done without 
effort. " The whole creation travaileth together ^^ 



DOING WHAT WE CAN. 83 

in the march of it. No great thing comes but 
by reason of a conception greater still, and a 
struggle along the way unto it. 

The effort of growing must have three great 
qualities or virtues : It must be earnest ; that 
is, strong in purpose and desire. It must be 
thoughtful ; that is, full of reason and inward 
argument how the growth is to be attained and 
what manner of endeavor is needful. It must 
be steady ; that is, forceful and forward, full of 
will, not fitful or by drift or impulse at this 
moment or another, and sometimes backward, 
but with one motion to the end. 

And now what have we in these three virtues 
of earnestness, thoughtf ulness, and steadiness ? 
What but emotion, reason, and will ! — the whole 
being of us. How great a perfection, then, is 
growing ! 

But again, consider that, if we do what we 
can, and all we can, we do perfectly, and have 
become perfected therein. And he who does all 
he can is perfect. Is he not, at that moment, 
complete for that instant ? Hath he not reached 
his limit at that time ? Hath he not finished 
himself at that hour and for that space and 



34 DOING WHAT WE CAJST. 

place where he is ? For if he hare done all he 
can, what else is left ? He is at the perfection 
of himself at that time. 

I can show this by a pleasant and shrewd 
story : 

A poor man stood near a vaunting and boasting 
musician who was proclaiming his fine playing. 
The poor man said, quietly, ^^I can equal you, 
friend/^ Great was the scorn of the musician 
and the amusement of the bystanders. "Very 
well, let us match ourselves in a trial,'^ said the 
poor man. The musician then played superbly, 
and the poor man followed very simply and 
decently, but no whit in parity with the artist; 
yet when he had done, he said, " I have equaled 
you, friend.^' "What! do you say your per- 
formance was equal to mine?^^ "No, indeed; 
that is another thing: I said naught of your 
jperformance or mine. I said but that / would 
equal you, — not your playing but yourself. And 
I have kept my word, for I did my best ; and 
you could do no more than do your best. So 
that we were just equal as men, though our 
performance was different. Was there the 
breadth of a hair between your virtue and mine 
in it? This should teach you, friend, not to 



DOIISra WHAT WE CAN. 35 

boast, and not to look scornfully or slightingly 
on others; for with all your skill you can be 
nothing more excellent than any man who will 
do his best/' 

This doctrine of perfectness, that it is great 
perfectness to do what we can, hath a place in 
pure morals as well as in arts and industries; 
ay, and its very best place, by as much as high 
morality is better than to excel in any art. 
Morality hath indeed a very special relation to 
the perfectness of doing what we can, a relation 
altogether its own, by reason of the commanding 
nature of morality, which the poet calls 

*' Stern daughter of the voice of God." 

This we shall understand if we look at it a 
little closely and under two heads : 

First, what if we judge ill and mistake the 
nature of things, deeming something to be good 
and right which in truth is wrong and harmful ? 
Or what if we be perplexed and cannot decide 
between two judgments or actions, not seeing 
clearly what is the good and right way under all 
the conditions ? Well, if we have judged ill, 
but did what we could to judge well, we shall 
be at peace ; indeed, at such great peace that wo 



36 DOIISTG WHAT WE CAN. 

shall be able to bear quietly the effects of our 
error and ignorance. This peace, whether we 
shall have it, will depend on how we can answer 
two questions which will press home unto us, 
namely. Did we do what we could to learn and 
judge well ? and, With what manner of motive 
did we act ? Were we single-eyed ? Did we 
wish with perfect sincerity to know the good 
and right way, or were we confused with other 
motives which beat up about us the dust of a 
conflict of selfish interests and desires ? For it 
is wonderful and glorious what power we have 
to see the truth when the truth is all we wish 
to see. 

But there is a second case : What if we fail 
to do the right, while knowing the right clearly ? 
Ah! this is the one inalienable grief and pain 
and shame. For then we have not the support 
of having done what we could. In this pure 
moral sphere, when the right way clearly is 
seen, and the proof is this, that ^tis acknowl- 
edged in our better and higher hours, we always 
feel — and ^tis not to be escaped however we 
argue, dally, or plead for ourselves — that we 
need not have failed. ISTothing compelled us. 
'Tis the very office and nature of morality that 



DOING WHAT WE CAN. 37 

it insists^ and will hear no nay, that always we 
can do what toe ought to do. " But, what ! " say 
you. ^^Are there not hard conditions ? Are not 
some souls born in bad places and with untoward 
bodies full of fevers? Can the ill-taught or 
the ill-made do as well as the instructed or the 
happily-formed?^^ No. But each one can do 
what he knows. He can equal his knowledge in 
his act. Nothing is more certain than this, and 
the mind will not let it go. 

But in those failures wherein we know a 
better way and do a worse way, are we all com- 
fortless ? No. We are ashamed before our own 
eyes, but we are not to despise ourselves as 
castaways. To fall is not to be a ruin. ^Tis 
only that which stays fallen that is a ruin. 
Hereto applies well the good and sturdy proverb, 
"He who gets up every time he falls, sometime 
will get up to remain standing.^^ To be ashamed 
is right, but to despair is wrong. To condemn 
myself is a strength, because it is to say, " I can 
do what I ought and what I know I ought ^^; 
but utterly to despise myself is a weakness, for no 
one is to be abhorred or to raise a mere disgust 
but one who so monstrously is composed that he 
is able to know what is right but can not do it. 



38 DOING WHAT WE CAN. 

Therefore, let me take cheer, and buckle myself 
again ; and if I fall, be ashamed and feel how 
mean is such an overthrow, and say, " Lo ! how 
little a thing prevailed over me ! ''—like a knight 
smarting with being beaten by a foe smaller than 
himself. This certainly will be the doing of one 
thing which always we can do, namely, to keep 
to the image of what is heavenly, ideal, beauti- 
ful, and to love it, and to give ear to no excuses, 
but to blame ourselves if we desert it, and to run 
into a cave of shame till we can come forth 
better resolved to strive again in the light. 

As some are spread around with bitter condi- 
tions, and confused with direful passions, which 
make lovely conduct a hard attainment, so again 
others are penned in bare corners, and heaped up 
with petty cares and small business^ which seem 
at first no ground for beautiful or heroic life to 
grow in — hemmed in with common labors, few 
and small opportunities, lowly stations, cramped 
room, little means, uninfluential company. And 
with these limitations there may be great thirst 
of mind and heart, longings, aspirations, ambi- 
tions, — very likely noble ambitions. It is by 
no means an easy and glad thing to be crowded 
by conditions into lonely, obscure corners of 



DOING WHAT WE CAN. 39 

unrecompensed, unloved and uncheered labors. 
This is a heavy bnrden to carry even a little 
while ; and for life, as some do, very heavy. The 
heart is worn and bowed down. 

What is the remedy ? To reflect on the nature 
of perf ectness, that it is to do all we can. 

One may do anything in such a way that it is 
only a thing done, or one may do it in such a 
manner that it is a deed. What odds what the 
work may be? The question is, What is the 
spirit and manner of the doing of it ? Bryant 
says this of one of the bits of life's business 
which all must do, of whatever estate or place, 
namely, dying: 

" Go not, like the quarry slave at night, 
Scourged to his dungeon." 

'Tis a curious thought that all are equal anyway 
in their manner of being born, for no one hath 
any will or behavior in that ; and then, after a 
life-span of vast differences, powers, pleasures, 
privileges, estates, fortunes, all are just alike 
again in power to die with dignity and do a deed 
therein ; and the richest in place, power or pros- 
perity can transact the business of dying no more 
worthily of it, nor with more proper adornment, 



40 DOING WHAT WE CAK. 

than the most lowly and obscure. But what 
event of life is there, or what daily business, that 
stands not so ? 'Tis possible to give a penny 
more finely and magnificently than a dollar or 
ten thousand dollars. In whatever may be done 
a man may be a yokel, a slave, a skulker whipped 
to his place, a beast of burden goaded under his 
pack, or he may be manful and knightly, so that 
he makes a small thing as much of a deed as 
any one can make a large thing. If any work be 
finer or nobler in itself, yet the deed of doing 
the lower labor may be as great as the deed of 
doing the higher. If one simply stand to his 
post manfully, that is a deed equal to the stand- 
ing manfully to any other post. Therefore, 
though God giveth to us very different occasions 
and places, he giveth to every one the same scope 
to do deeds in his own place. What hath one, 
then, more than another-? Nothing, in the great- 
est point ; therefore little altogether. 

The question is this : Do we wish the praise 
of God or of men ? Do we long for some fine 
appearance amid circumstances, or to be with 
reality, at the heart of l^ature ! If the latter, 
we have only to do all we can where we are and 
in what circumstances we are 5 adding this, that 



DOING WHAT WE CAIST. 41 

always a part of what we can do is to keep dig- 
nity and a sweet devotion or rank, and serene 
consciousness of our high place amid the real, 
by means of quiet content and simple uncom- 
plainingness, — not being restless or envious, or 
either looking too much up at others or down on 
ourselves, but calmly and piously and willingly 
looking around us on the level of the virtue of 
doing what we can. 

To be ambitious of great works is to apply 
for men's admiration; but to be ambitious or 
aspiring to do simply all we can, and have a 
pure peace therein, that is to be co-workers with 
the divine. 

I can not write these simple thoughts with- 
out a visitation in mind of Captain Jackson in 
Charles Lamb's fine picture of him — " a retired 
half-pay officer, with a wife and two grown-up 
daughters, whom he maintained with the port 
and notions of gentlewomen on that slender pro- 
fessional allowance/' He had the " noble tone 
of hospitality when first you set foot in the 
cottage — anxious ministerings about you where 
little or nothing (God knows) was to be min- 
istered — Althea's horn in a poor platter, the 



42 DOIISTG WHAT WE CAK. 

power of self-encliantment by which in his mag- 
nificent wishes to entertain you he multiplied 
his means to bounties. You saw with your 
bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag, 
cold savings from the foregone meal, remnant 
hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the 
door contented. But in the copious will, the 
reveling imagination of your host — ^the mind, 
the mind, Master Shallow ^ — whole beeves were 
spread before you — hecatombs — no end ap- 
peared to the profusion. It was the widow's 
cruse, the loaves and fishes : carving could not 
lessen nor helping diminish it — the stamina 
were left — the elemental bone still flourished 
divested of its accidents. . . . Eich men direct 
you to their furniture, poor ones divert you from 
it. He neither 'did one nor the other, but, by 
simply assuming that every thing was handsome 
about him, you were positively at a demur 
what you did or did not see at the cottage. With 
nothing to live on, he seemed to live on every 
thing. He had a stock of wealth in his mind ; 
not that which is properly termed content, for 
in truth he was not to be contained at all, 
but overflowed all bounds by the force'' of 
himself. 



DOIKG WHAT WE CAN. 43 

What a gracious portrait ! How it doth 
honor life, and the soul in life, and mankind, 
and Providence! 

To do what we can hath a fine name. It is, 
" The habit of excellence/^ 

Once I was asked by a wise man about a 
young girl. I answered, "I know little of her — 
hardly more than this, that she makes delicious 
bread." "That is enough/^ said my friend; "the 
point is to have established ' the habit of excel- 
lence.^ " 

This was a wise saying, both as to the virtue 
of the " habit " and as to the results of it. For 
this kind of perf ectness, that we do what we can, 
is so great that it brings another perfectness, 
nay, it drags it along behind and compels it to 
enter our doors and bless us — I mean an actual 
beauty and fine quality in the thing done, and 
the bringing of something to pass excellently, 
which follows on our doing what we can of it 
constantly and faithfully. Let any one read at 
his best to-day, or play on viol or flute, or sing, 
or work at bench in wood or metal, or compose 
music or poesy, or arrange and decorate the 
home, or cook for table, or nurse the sick, or till 



44 DOING WHAT WE CAN. 

a garden of flowers, or do what thing he will, if 
he do fully what he can of it, then to-morrow he 
will be able to do it a little better. Nay, if even 
he practise the action in his mind, reflecting on 
it, so that, after having done what he can of it, 
he go on with a mental study of it, doing it over 
again in thought with care and attention, he will 
prevail more in it the next time he essays it — 
handling the viol or flute more musically, singing 
more beautifully, making a finer thing with tools, 
or attaining a better poem; and so with all 
things. Doth not this show plainly how great 
a perfectness it is to do what we can, since it 
brings trooping behind it all other kinds of 
excellence, and makes perfectness to abide with 
us in actual things to be seen and heard and 
touched, agreeing together in forms that are 
great beauty? 

How immediate is the effect and impressive- 
ness of any thing that hath attained perfectness 
of its kind, or that so hath aimed at it and 
labored toward it that it seems to have come 
to it! In that great book of Eush, "On the 
Voice," — wonderfully great, — the author speaks 
of the power of those mighty examples of vocal 



DOING WHAT WE CAIST. 45 

perfection which " sound along the highways of 
the world/' the great singers, — their power to 
^^ quell the pride of rank by its momentary sensa- 
tion of envy.'' It is a great means whereby God 
bends the necks of the stubborn and calls a 
haughty carriage to a halt. I protest that never 
yet I saw tumblers, acrobats and athletes at their 
feats but I forgot the spangles and sawdust, and, 
for the space of my entrancement before the 
perfect, envied them, or wished I could do such 
things, and thought it better to be they in those 
perfections than myself in my pen-work which 
creeps along so far from the shining perfectness 
that is imaginable therein. And before any fine 
mechanical production, a perfectness of hand- 
work, always I feel myself in a certain very 
great presence. I took once to a mechanic a bit 
of furniture to be repaired. It had not been 
misused, but had broken under the service it 
was made for. The man mended it, but soon it 
broke again in the same place. I took it then 
to a carpenter whose work I had had some 
occasion to admire. " There," said he, when he 
handed it back to me, ''ii it ever break again 
I will make you another one without charge." 
^^You mean," said I, ^^ unless it shall last reason- 



46 DOING WHAT WE CAN 

ably well." "No," said he, "I mean if it ever 
break, your life long." And he spake well, for 
here is the wooden article still in my house, used 
continually these many years, and showing no 
more signs of " giving " than a hill of stone. I 
felt a kind of radiance glow round me when 
that mechanic said, " If it ever break ! " There 
seemed a transcendence in that spot, and 
presence of divinity. — ^'Seemed, friend ? Nay, 
it was ; I know not ' seemed ' ! " 

One other thought; It is a part of doing all 
we can, and the best we can, to be able to per- 
ceive good things, good works, and to admire 
them generously; and especially to be more 
alive to the beauties than to the blemishes of 
any work ; and, most of all, to be full of a fine, 
rich, loyal, just and noble sense of the virtue of 
one who honestly and in a due place, and mod- 
estly, is doing what he can. For no one is yet 
ready to come to any very high work who hath 
not done what he can, and who is not humbly 
striving to do it, with what he has most in hand, 
namely, himself; so that critics have averred, 
and justly, that there is no preparation for 
works of art that can replace an exalted and 



DOING WHAT WE CAN, 47 

honorable and ideal-loving soul, but that this is 
worth all schools and is the better part of all 
genius, on which both schools and genius must 
be builded. Wherefore, there is no part of our 
doing what we can with our circumstances 
which can help us so much to high work as what 
we do on our own minds and hearts, to bring 
them to a complete and right way. And the 
honesty, simplicity, generosity, and pure love of 
beauty, which shine in a generous esteem of 
others' labors, and especially in a high valuation 
of one who hath the dignity of doing what he 
can in his station, — this is an excellence which 
must precede any fine and lovely labor. He who 
is envious, or enviously unadmiring, or coldly 
indifferent, or ungenerously belittling of others' 
work, or fastens more readily on blemishes than 
on beauties, or jeers or laughs rudely because he 
feels superior or because he has no sympathy, 
this man hath yet to come to any high poise and 
building of power in art or letters or in any 
great works ; or at least, if he be strong, still 
he will be far from the fine conditions of doing 
what he can in any art of beauty or work of 
elevation, because he yet is so far from doing 
what he can in himself and his private station. 



48 DOING WHAT WE CAN. 

Meantime, how beautiful this idea of being 
perfected! How fair this equal kingdom for 
all ! How lovely it is that there is a temple of 
reason and a presence of God in which all the 
mighty works, all the triumphs, of men, count 
nothing compared with the simple dignity and 
pure beauty of doing what we can ! How fine 
to know this superior order of nobility ! Amid 
all the noises and acclamations of earth, all 
honors and glorifications of men, prides and 
distinctions, how heartening to see this equality 
before God which will reverse many things, and 
daily is doing so, in order to make first in men's 
eyes also what is first in God's ! How comfort- 
ing to think that the neglected, if they do what 
they can, and wait with piety, which is one of 
the things they can, are exceedingly dear to the 
heart of God, and that no work of man is more 
honorable and no archangel more glorious ! And 
how blissful, rich, full of onany colors like the 
sky under the sun, joyful and blessed, life looks 
to us, and fellow-creatures appear, when we 
attain to this manner of sight wherewith to 
look forth on them! 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 

MiNOT J. Savage. 



Life is a game the soul can play 

With fewer pieces than men say. 

Might one be healed from fevering thought, 

And only look, each night, 

On some plain work well-wrought; 

Or if a man as right and true might be 

As a flower or a tree ! 

I would give up all that the mind 

In the prim city's hoard can find — 

House with its scrap-art bedight, 

Straitened manners of the street, 

Smooth-voiced society — 

If so the swiftness of the wind 

Might pass into my feet; 

If so the sweetness of the wheat 

Into my soul might pass, 

And the clear courage of the grass ; 

If the lark caroled in my song; 

If one tithe of the faithfulness 

Of the bird-mother with her brood 

Into my selfish heart might press, 

And make me also instinct-good. 

— Edward Bowland Sill, 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



THE important things of life are the common- 
place things. It is not the unusual, it is not 
the strange, it is not that which happens once a 
year or once a lifetime, upon which our welfare 
and happiness depend. The sunlight is very 
commonplace, the air is commonplace, the ocean, 
the mountains, the leaves of the trees in the 
Spring, the singing of birds, the brightness of 
the sky, the every-day facts of home, the love 
of friends, our books, our employments, our 
pleasures,— these are all commonplace. And 
yet these are the stuffs out of which are woven 
the webs of our lives. 

Since the beginning of human history, man has 
been lured onward by one grand purpose. One 
thing has fascinated him, one thing has been the 
object of his universal and eternal desire, one 



62 THE HAPPY LIFE. 

thing has he sought ; and that is the common- 
place thing that we call happiness. Man's dream 
of the past has been of a Garden of Eden, a 
Paradise, the place where our first parents were 
perfectly happy. This was the essence of it all. 
As to where it was located, as to the kind of 
trees that grew in it, the fountains, the flowers, 
the fruits, the surroundings, — these are only the 
dressing to the picture. The one thing that the 
world has meant by Paradise is that it was a 
place of perfect joy and rest. Since that has 
been lost, since the dream has faded away, or 
since we no longer believe that it was ever pos- 
sessed except as a dream, still we are engaged in 
the same search. We are looking for Paradise, 
either to regain it, if we believe we had it once 
and have been deprived of it, or else to create it, 
if it has never existed. The one dream of the 
world is of a place of happiness, in this world 
or beyond. Heaven, — what is that ? We may 
picture it as a place, a city whose streets are 
gold, whose gates are pearl ; we may picture it 
as a garden, with the tree of knowledge, of hap- 
piness, growing upon the banks of the river of 
life ; but it is always a place where there shall 
be no more death, where sorrow and sighing shall 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 53 

flee away, where there shall be no more pain, and 
where God shall wipe all tears from our eyes. 
It is a place of restful happiness. And it is the 
spur to all human endeavor. Or if we have given 
up the Eden behind us, and also the Eden before 
us, and if we believe to-day that mankind has its 
destinies linked simply to this old planet, — that 
there is nothing else for us to look for but man- 
kind's future, — still we feel ourselves impelled 
to pursue that course of conduct, to be governed 
by those principles of action, which we are led 
to believe will issue in a better future for the 
world. That is, more happiness. We are to con- 
duct ourselves in such a way that our descendants 
shall be free from the disabilities, the evils, under 
which we suffer. They shall no longer carry the 
burdens, the heart-aches, the ignorance and pain, 
that we have had to bear. Thus we attempt so 
to order our lives that they shall be a part of 
that music that shall issue in the gladness of the 
world. 

Whether we will or not, we cannot help seek- 
ing happiness. I have never yet seen a person 
who did not seek it. I cannot even imagine a 
human being sensitive to pleasure and pain who 
would not seek it. If one does not seek it con- 



64 THE HAPPY LIFE. 

sciously for himself, he is seeking it for somebody 
else ; and, though he may not realize it, he is in 
that way finding his own pleasure, so that, con- 
sciously or not, he is being lured on by the beauty 
and fascination of this one universal object of 
human search. 

Consider for a moment. I say that we cannot 
help seeking happiness. No man ever lived, no 
man lives now, no man ever can live, who by any 
possibility of imagination can be conceived of as 
choosing something that on the whole he does 
not want. If there are two things, one of which 
he must take, and he does not want either of 
them really, he nevertheless must choose that 
which he wants more, or which is least disagree- 
able to him. Voluntary choice means that a man 
takes that which, considering what he is and 
the circumstances by which he is surrounded, he 
prefers among the different possible objects of 
his choice. A man, then, is under the eternal 
necessity of seeking happiness in some degree, 
under some name, or disguised as you will under 
some form. Herbert Spencer has made us famil- 
iar with the principle which is the essence and 
at the foundation of life ; and that is this, that 
sentient beings are always so constituted that 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 65 

those things which conduce to the preservation 
and increase of life are the ones that in their 
search and attainment confer pleasure. He has 
made it plain that^ were it otherwise, the human 
race would soon become extinct and all sentient 
beings would die from off the face of the earth. 
If we preferred those things that are injurious 
to us, which are inimical to our health, to our 
longevity, it would only be a few years before 
we should be led on by our desires to the choosing 
of such things or the doing of such actions as 
would work out the entire extinction of the race. 
So that those things which are for the good of 
man on the whole and in the long run are the 
ones that are forever linked with the pursuit of 
happiness. It is a necessity of every sentient 
being. 

But there are two important points that we 
ought to note just here, two principles that we 
must never overlook, lest by a fatal error we fall 
into such a course of life as shall be injurious to 
others and ultimately destructive to ourselves. 

In the first place, we are to remember that you 
and I have no right to seek our personal happi- 
ness, our personal gratification and pleasure, at 
the expense of the happiness, gratification, and 



Ob THE HAPPY LIFE. 

welfare of any otlier sentient being. For the 
happiness of my friend or of a stranger who occu- 
pies the same earth with me is just as sacred as 
my own; and, for the sake of acquiring any 
pleasure, or what seems to me my own good, I 
have no right to injure another. 

Then there is that other thing which has been 
demonstrated over and over again as the result of 
the world's experience : that he who seeks pleas- 
ure as the one first and always important object 
of his search is almost sure to miss that which 
he desires. In other words, it has been proved 
that the world's happiness, on the whole and in 
the long run, depends upon certain courses of con- 
duct which we have agreed to call just and right. 
So that he who forgets all about happiness, if 
he can do such a thing, — this upspringing desire 
at the centre of his life, this mainspring and 
motive of all activity, — he who forgets it and 
simply determines to follow the guiding star of 
duty, to be always just, always unselfish, to do 
always the right, he is taking the very straight- 
est possible road toward the highest degree and 
the largest amount of happiness both for himself 
and for all others concerned. This is what we 
mean, when we analyze it clearly, when we talk 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 67 

about right^ about one tbing being rigbt and 
something else being wrong. It is as far as 
human experience has gone. We can go no deeper 
tban that. Those courses of conduct that we call 
right are what the world has found out, by long 
and bitter experience, to be conducive to human 
welfare and happiness ; and those things that we 
call wrong are the ones that hurt, that injure, 
that take away from the sum and depreciate the 
quality of the world's happiness. 

We have, then, no right to take our happiness 
at the expense of anybody else ; we have no right 
to make our personal gratification the dominant 
object of our endeavor, because in so doing we 
have found that we shall ultimately fail in our 
object, and also work injury to others, 

I now propose, first, to say a few things neg- 
atively, as to what does not make the happy 
life. 

The happy man is not always, not commonly, 
at any rate not necessarily, the rich man. Yet 
in this country there is no single thing that all 
men, women and children are so eager in the 
pursuit of as riches. We fancy, in spite of hu- 
man experience, and in spite of the lessons that 
observation is able to teach us, that^ if we could 



68 THE HAPPY LIFE. 

only attain this, we should really grasp the secret 
of happiness. Yet you know perfectly well that 
nothing in the wide world is farther from the 
truth than that. I have seen some happy rich 
men. I have seen a great many happy men who 
were not rich. And it is my impression that, if 
I were seeking for the pre-eminently happy man 
to-day, I should not find him among those that 
we call wealthy. This is not at all strange. 
Wealth, honestly gained, intelligently and justly 
and humanely used, is an immense power for the 
elevation of the world, and, it seems to me, might 
be made a great power for the production of per- 
sonal happiness to the possessor 5 and yet it is 
only a means to an end, and most of the time, 
it seems to me, it is not used to that end. It is 
rather made an end in itself, that absorbs all the 
thought and power, the intelligence, genius and 
heart of man, so that he forgets what he is doing 
it all for, and simply finds himself absorbed year 
after year in doing it. The most of the rich men 
that I know are absorbed their whole lives long 
in getting rich. They dream that some time or 
other they will stop ; but I have found few who 
have done so. They simply keep on grinding, 
year after year, the same machine for the pro- 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 69 

duction of more and more wealtli. If a boy be 
poor, and starts out with, a full determination to 
become rich, beyond and above everything else, 
the chances are that it will take all his time, all 
his genius, all his thought, and all his power. 
It will call for the exercise, the absorbing use, 
of every energy of his being. He will probably 
succeed; but, when he has succeeded, what then ? 
He has not had time to do anything else. He 
has had no time to train his brain in any other 
direction ; he has had no time to cultivate his 
affections, his love ; he has had no time to acquire 
knowledge or science, art, or any other thing of 
interest in the world. So that the chances are — 
I do not say that it is always true, but the chances 
are that, when he is rich, he has no time left for 
anything more. Is not this true ? Is it not the 
result of dispassionate observation of the world ? 
Wealth, then, is not essential to happiness. 

Power is not essential to happiness. It has 
passed into a proverb that " uneasy lies the head 
that wears a crown.'' Some of the unhappiest 
men of history have been those that held in their 
hands the sovereignty of the world. Take a man 
like Napoleon. Would he be your ideal of a 
happy man? The man who changed the civ- 



60 THE HAPPY LIFE. 

ilization of the modern world, who made whole 
nations tremble with a glance of his eye, — was 
he a happy man ? Thousands of Erench peasants, 
in their blue blouses, weary with their day's work 
on their little patches of soil, have sat down 
under their vine-covered porches, in the soft air 
and beauty of the disappearing sunlight, while 
the bird of joy has sung its sweet song of simple, 
humble content in hearts happier a thousand 
times than a king. 

Intellectual greatness, authorship, fame, to be 
known and read all over the world, — this does 
not confer happiness necessarily. The intel- 
lectual giant of his age was Dean Swift ; but, if 
you wished to put your finger upon the most 
miserable man of his age you would probably 
select this same Dean Swift, a man who, seeking 
for petty place and power, had his heart eaten 
out with envy and jealousy and all conflicting 
passions, while he was easily intellectual monarch 
of his time. He found in this which was his own 
no happiness, while he made himself miserable 
in the search for those things which he never 
could attain. 

Social position does not necessarily confer hap- 
piness. If I wished to find the happiest woman 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 61 

in Boston, Washington, or New York, I should 
not search for the social leader, for one who was 
at the summit of what is called society, for one 
who could dictate as to who should and who 
should not have entrance into the select circles 
of the city. You know too well what a dreary, 
empty sort of life this that we call fashionable 
generally is, how little real satisfaction is found 
in it, and how those who follow it, when they 
are through with the public display, go back to 
their homes with a sigh, thankful that the empty 
routine is done at last. 

In none of these conditions, then, will you find 
happiness. It is not these that constitute the 
happy man or that make the happy life. 

We talk sometimes about the injustice of God's 
government of the world, as though the average 
man and woman did not have a chance to gain 
the highest objects of human desire. In one 
sense, this is true. The government of this world 
is very unfair, if the real things that men and 
women need are wealth, power, intellectual great- 
ness, social station. If those are the things which 
constitute the only great absorbing objects of 
human search, then you can count on your fingers 
almost all the men and women in a generation 



62 THE HAPPY LIFE. 

that have attained them : the rest of the world 
lives, suffers, smiles for a little while, and dies, — 
a failure. If that he true. But it is not true. 
The things you and I really need for happiness, 
the things that we need for satisfying these 
wants, are open and free, — free as the broad blue 
heaven, free as the stars at night, free as the air 
we breathe, free as the ocean outlook, free as the 
grasses of the field and the blossoms of June. 

What, then, are the essentials that make up 
the happy life ? I assume the possession of a 
fair degree of health and some of the comforts 
of life. But I do not know that I need to go so 
far as to assume even these. I believe one of the 
most important things to happiness is health; yet 
I have seen a great many people who did not 
possess health, who were a thousandfold happier 
than those who did. I believe that those things 
which we are accustomed to call comforts are 
very important to our happiness ; and yet I have 
known a great many people, who did not possess 
a fraction of what we regard as essential, who 
were a thousand times happier than those who do 
possess them. But I shall assume the possession 
of those, and speak briefly of three things that 
seem to me really essential to the happy life. 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 63 

If you examine the structure of a human being, 
I mean not simply his physical, but his moral, 
intellectual, spiritual nature, you may easily sep- 
arate it into three great divisions. There are, in 
the first place, all those faculties that make him 
hunger for an active life; then there is that 
domain of his nature which is passional, affec- 
tional, which makes him desire some object on 
which to lavish his love ; and there is that other 
department that looks onward with aspiration, 
that we cover with the one word " hope,^^ which 
looks toward the future, which has an outlook, 
indefinite perhaps, but fixed, toward finer, sweet- 
er, better things than any we have attained in 
the past. I should say, then, that the three 
things essential to the happy life are these, — 
something to do, something to love, something 
to hope for. 

If you wish to find out who are the pessimists, 
the ones who are asking, like the writer of Eccle- 
siastes, whether life is worth living, you need not 
go to the man who has even a little garden patch, 
if he has something to interest him, to take up 
his time, something that he likes to do. You need 
not go to the farmer who has his own little estate 
from which he gains even a scanty subsistence, 



64 THE HAPPY LIFE. 

who takes pride in his work, who loves to see his 
fields smoothly mown in the haying time, who 
takes personal satisfaction in having his rows 
of potatoes straight, in hoeing them as though 
engaged in a work of art, and, when he has fin- 
ished a row, leans on the handle of his hoe and 
looks over his work, and thinks he has done his 
best. You need not go to such a commonplace 
life as that to find one despairing about the world. 
You would go to the " clubs," to the men who 
have nothing to do, who have tasted everything, 
who have drained the cup of life to its dregs, and 
found nothing but dregs. These are the men who 
question about the future, or who do not care 
whether there is any future, who do not think 
that the game of life is worth the candle, or that 
the world is worth the trouble of starting it. 
You would go into fashionable society, to the 
young married or unmarried women who have 
nothing to do, who have no object, no purpose in 
life, who are not linked to any cause. The first 
essential to happiness, then, is something to do. 
If it is only a little, it is better than nothing ; 
but better far is it if it can be some great 
thing, something that touches the life, the wel- 
fare of humanity, some broad, general work that 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 66 

links the little life to the great central life, so 
that one can say, and say it reverently, "God 
and I.'' 

Next, there must be something to love. We 
are fashioned in such a strange way that, on this 
affectional side of us, we are like the sun: the 
more it pours forth the wealth of its warmth and 
light, the brighter are its beams and the richer 
it still remains. So the more we pour out the 
wealth of our love and affection on the objects 
worthy of love, the more are we like a fountain 
that flows year after year, that has no bottom, 
because it springs from the eternal sources of the 
world, like a spring that has underground con- 
nection with the exhaustless sea. Human hearts 
demand something to love. They will fix upon 
some poor little pet, or some hobby, some slight, 
worthless thing, if they have no great thing 
offered to their choice ; and yet how grand it is 
when men have learned to love noble men, noble 
women, to love childhood, to love humanity, to 
love Nature, to love art, the wide world's beauty, 
and when they dare say, including all these in 
one word, — I love God, the eternal life, the ideal 
of all, that which is the heart and soul and main- 
spring of all ! 



66 THE HAPPY LIFE. 

Next, something to hope for. The beauty of a 
journey over the world is not in what you can see 
this minute ; but it is the attitude of expectancy, 
the new views at every onward rush of the train. 
I remember that, when sailing up the Ehine, the 
most intensely interesting thing about it to me 
was the constant expectancy. I had read in 
story, travel, poetry, about the Ehine, and I knew 
what was coming, and was waiting ; and, as we 
turned this curve of the river, there appeared 
the spot where some historic deed was done ; this 
castle-crowned rock shadowed itself in the placid 
stream ; some new thing was seen at every turn. 
This attitude of expectancy, of onlooking, is the 
secret of hope ; and, if we can only have that 
deepest and grandest expectancy of all, that 
overleaps the accident of death, and feels sure 
that it is an accident, why, then trouble, sorrow, 
loss of friends, loss of property, sickness, are like 
the broken doll of the little child, over which 
she weeps her transient tears that will soon be 
dried. The tears of childhood have been com- 
pared to dew-drops shaken from fragrant flowers 
by the passing breeze that leaves no trace, but 
are ready to make rainbows with the sunshine 
that shall succeed. 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 67 

These three things, then, are the essentials in 
the happiness of human life, — something to do, 
something to love, something to hope for. 

It seems to me, as I look over human society 
and study the kinds of life men lead, and as I 
study my own, — for I include myself in the same 
category,— that two-thirds of the sufferings and 
sorrows and miseries of life are utterly uncalled 
for; that we make ourselves sad, burden our 
hearts, and go through life with trouble, just 
because we are wilful and choose to do so, not 
because there is any necessity for it. 

Look at one of the things that destroys the 
happiness of many people, — the quality of envy, 
the unwillingness to be happy with what they 
possess because some one else has something that 
is better. Just think how mean as well as useless 
that is. Would you deprive other people of the 
happiness in the things that are theirs ? And 
who is wise enough to look into the heart and 
read the inner life of this person that you envy, 
so as to be quite sure that there is any rational 
ground for envy ? I see people with great pos- 
sessions, with beautiful houses finely furnished, 
with estates and grounds laid out with trees, 
artificial lakes and everything that landscape- 



68 THE HAPPY LIFE. 

gardening can provide; and I sometimes wish. 
that I could possess such a place. But I never 
expect to, and do not feel at all certain that it 
would be best. Perhaps I would run the risk, if 
I had the opportunity ; and yet, as I look over 
such an estate, I think how much there is I can 
get out of it for which I do not have to pay. He 
who owns it has to pay for it, to hire men to keep 
it in order, to cut the lawns, to trim the trees, to 
care for the grounds. It is a perpetual care and 
expense to him. But I can look at it, and enjoy 
the beauty, and rejoice in it all, and it is all free 
to me. Yet I see thousands of people, who might 
take these things without money and without 
price, whose hearts are eaten out with a bitter 
envy, with a desire for personal possession, and 
who refuse to take advantage of it all because 
they do not carry the title-deeds for it in their 
pockets. 

There is also that general discontent with life 
that does not envy others so much as it refuses 
to be satisfied with what it possesses, because it 
does not possess something else. If we would 
remember the lesson of the old fable, a lesson 
which has come down from the pagan world, it 
might help us in this matter. 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 69 

Jupiter, weary of the world's complainings, 
once told the inhabitants of a certain district 
that they were at liberty to come together and 
throw down all the burdens they had been carry- 
ing, of which they were tired, and pick out of 
the gathered heap anything instead they chose. 
They came together, and threw them down ; and 
there was a miscellaneous assortment, as you may 
well believe. Each thought himself well rid of 
his own burden, and picked out something that 
had belonged to his neighbor, and started off. 
But, after a little while, they all came back to 
the same place and begged for their old burdens 
back again. They had found that the new bur- 
dens hurt in a way they had not imagined : they 
were used to the old, and found them easier to 
carry than the new. 

Another happiness-killer is foreboding. Look 
over your own lives and answer this question : 
is it not true that the larger part of the sorrows 
you have suffered from, the larger number of the 
burdens that have crushed out the joy of your 
life, the diseases, the calamities, the losses of 
property and of friends, have really never hap- 
pened at all ? You have suffered more from the 
things that did not happen than you ever did 



70 THE HAPPY LIFE. 

from the tilings that occurred. Think how use- 
less that is. Cease borrowing trouble then, and 
remember that there never was such a thing as 
to-morrow. E"obody ever had to carry any burden 
except to-day's burden; no one ever lived except, 
to-day, and never will. 

I am able to give a living illustration of the 
happiness I have in mind. 

There is a blind pedler who sells needles and 
pins, threads and buttons. He was at my door, 
and the conversation which suggested this topic 
was held with him. He has not been able to 
see for a good many years. He was asked, as 
he stood opposite the Square: "Now that the 
Spring has opened, and the buds have unfolded, 
and the leaves are so green and beautiful on the 
trees, and the grass so fine under foot, do you 
not miss your eyes, do you not wish you could 
see ? Does it not make you unhappy to think 
of the bright world, and of the many things to 
enjoy in it if you had your vision ? " The answer 
came, bright, happy, hearty, and free : " ISTo, I 
never think of repining. I am well, I have a 
kind and attentive wife, I have a business which 
gives me an honest support, I have everything 
that a man needs to make him happy; and I 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 71 

should consider myself mean and contemptible 
to find fault with my lot.'' 

The question came again : '' When you hear the 
voice of friends, do you not wish you could know 
how they look ? Do you not wish you could see 
their faces ? " The answer came as quickly as 
before : " I do see them. My ears are my eyes. 
My wife describes them until I imagine their 
faces and know all the generosity and the kind- 
liness of their looks." 

'' But, suppose you go to the seashore. Do you 
not wish you could look out over the ocean and 
see the white caps at their play ? " ^' Ko ; in 
imagination 1 do see the waves, the color reflected 
from the clouds. I hear them surging on the 
shore, I hear the wind blowing across them. In 
imagination I see, and rejoice in it all." 

It was a lesson to me, — to see a man in this 
condition, that I have pitied so many times as I 
have watched him going about the streets. I am 
not sure but henceforth it will be more rational 
for him to pity me. He has learned the secret 
of content and joy, of taking the beauty and 
good of life. He has something to do, some- 
thing to love, something to hope for. 

And these essentials of the happy life are not 



72 THE HAPPY LIFE. 

monopolies. The richest men of the world can- 
not possibly buy the things that are essential to 
your happiness. Nor can any man keep them 
from your control. All the elements, — beauty, 
life, love, joy, peace, — the things that make 
happiness here, and that make the hope of the 
grandest things hereafter, are free. Wherefore, 
then, do you spend money for that which is not 
bread, and your labor for that which satisfieth 
not? Free as the air are all things that are 
necessary to the making of the happy life. 




NOVEL- READING. 



BY 

W. L. Sheldon. 



I will be glad to be and do, 

And glad of all good men that live, 

For they are woof of Kature too ; 

Glad of the poets every one, 

Pure Longfellow, great Emerson, 

And all that Shakspere's world can give. 

When the road is dust, and the grass dies, 

Then will I gaze on the deep skies ; 

And if Dame Nature frown in cloud. 

Well, mother — then my heart shall say— 

You cannot so drive me away; 

I will still exult aloud. 

Companioned of the good hard ground 

Whereon stout hearts of every clime, 

In the battles of time, 

Foothold and couch have found ! 

Joy to the laughing troop 

That from the threshold starts. 

Led on by courage and immortal hope. 

And with the morning in their hearts. 

— Edward Bowland Sill, 
(74) 



NOVEL- READING. 

T BELIEVE in tlie novel. It is an excellent 
A panacea for the troubled mind and a worthy 
instrument for keeping us in touch with life. 
It is a relief sometimes to have a change of 
mood and a change of atmosphere. The easiest 
method for healing the wounds of bitterness or 
recovering from the effects of anxiety is to do 
something which will make us think about 
something else. 

I do not mean any form of novel; because 
there is a certain kind that would emphatically 
put us out of touch with life and be anything 
but a panacea for the moods which may dominate 
us. If you wish to escape from a certain attitude 
of mind, go to a book that deals with something 
else. Do not, under any circumstances, take the 
one that analyzes the mood which is natural to 



76 NOVEL-READING. 

you, and wMch. would lead you to philosophize 
about it. The surest way to become "philo- 
sophicaP^ over an experience may be to avoid 
philosophizing about it. The best way to foster 
melancholy is to study the anatomy of it. The 
best way to rid yourself of melancholy is to stop 
thinking about it, to stop thinking about your- 
self, and find means for making yourself think 
about what is going on in the lives of others. 
Often as this has been said, it is said none too 
often, for it is a lesson that is hard to learn. 

The novel has come to stay. It is, I fancy, 
a form of literature which is going to survive 
through all times. Indeed, we cannot overcome 
a certain wonder that it should be such a recent 
form of literature. Why did they not have it in 
the days of Athens ? Yet, we know, the ^^ story '^ 
has existed in one form or another through all 
ages, although only within the last few centuries 
has it taken the definite shape it now possesses. 
The fairy-tales of earlier times, the stories of the 
animal world as they have come down to us, the 
myth and the allegory, the fanciful talk sup- 
posed to be going on among the denizens of the 
forest, — what were these but novels, save for 
the fact that there was a half -belief in them — 



:NrOVEL-READING. 77 

because the mind of the mature man in those 
days resembled the mind of the child at the 
present time. 

Even now, our real interest in a story is because 
of the actual amount of truth involved in it. 
There is in all of us a touch, and a beautiful 
touch, of the child-mind, with its happy confusion 
between belief and unbelief, between the real 
and the unreal, the true and the fanciful. When 
we are reading a story we know perfectly well 
that just such persons have never lived. Stop 
us at any moment and put the question : " Do you 
believe what you are reading ? ^^ and we smile. 
Yet we cannot check the mood the book awakens 
as we go on reading it. 

In making a plea for the novel it is not to be 
assumed for a moment that I have any sympathy 
with the " voracious '^ novel-reader. Such a per- 
son is not put in touch with real life, but rather 
carried into a kind of dreamland. He comes to 
live in a world of unreality until his actual sym- 
pathies are dulled and he can positively shed 
tears over a story without feeling the slightest 
sympathy for the suffering going on under his 
own eyes. When any one is even faintly ap- 
proaching that state of mind, then novel-reading 



78 NOVEL-READING. 

becomes a vice ; and there is something of this 
vice existing in most civilized countries now-a- 
days. People can go on reading fancy pictures 
of the trials and troubles of human nature until 
they are disposed to do even less than they would 
have done to alleviate those trials and troubles 
when occurring in real life. Sympathy, pity, 
mercy, tenderness, righteous indignation — these 
are natural to all of us. They are motive forces 
which can either affect the will, or find their 
satisfaction solely by being played upon through 
art. For this reason, enthusiasm for art of any 
kind, if carried too far, may easily take the place 
of action, weakening the will rather than inspir- 
ing it. You can luxuriate in a sense of pity for 
a character in a story, and by that very means 
exhaust your sense of pity for real characters 
before your eyes. 

Yet, withal, I cling to my belief in the value 
of novel-reading. But it depends not only on 
the amount we do ; it also depends on the kind 
of novels we read. Unquestionably, there is a 
certain class of literature now-a-days which is 
affecting human nature very much as the exten- 
sive use of drugs is affecting the minds of men 
and women at the present time. I am not sure 



IsrOVEL-READING. 79 

but that they both gratify the same cravings. 
There seems to be an instinctive fondness on 
the part of human nature to indulge in a semi- 
delirium. Oftentimes, the more you have of that 
delirium the more you want of it. We have a 
way of calling such drugs ^^ tonics/^— but half of 
them are poisons ; and the use of nearly all of 
them becomes poisonous in the extent to which 
people are more and more becoming dependent 
upon them. There are persons who get this semi- 
delirium not from drugs but from novel-reading. 
To that extent and in that form it is a vice. It 
acts like opium, weakening and destroying the 
will. Men can become so dependent on excite- 
ment that they cannot get along without it. 
They are ever demanding a ^^new sensation." 
Such a thing as intellectual or spiritual debauch- 
ery is quite within the bounds of possibility. 

We carry in us the good and bad tendencies 
of untold preceding ages. For most of us there 
is a certain fascination in the abnormal. It 
would seem as if a vast number of people like 
to read about crimes ; to observe or study the 
brutal side of human nature. There is a great 
deal of truth in the attack which Nordau has 
made upon certain characteristics of the literature 



80 NOVEL-READING. 

at the close of our century. We shall get over 
this '' degenerate '^ tendency by and by ; although, 
beyond doubt, there is a certain class of influen- 
tial writers now playing upon this instinctive 
hankering for the abnormal. They are giving us 
what might be called ^^pathological studies." 
We read them in spite of ourselves, even though 
they half sicken us. If there were such insti- 
tutions as "medical schools for the soul," that is 
where these studies would belong. They cer- 
tainly have no place in literature. 

At the time I was reading " The Damnation 
of Theron Ware " I was reading over again the 
story of "Adam Bede," by George Eliot. How 
alike they are, and yet how contrasted ! They 
both affect us sorrowfully ; both tend to bring 
tears to the eyes. Both have a fascination. 
There is truth — an immense amount of truth — 
in both of the stories. It is human nature pict- 
ured there ; and yet the chords they play upon 
are not the same at all. In the case of the 
former, the story half sickened me, although I 
could not let it alone. It was to me just as if I 
were watching a man bleed to death — seeing the 
blood run — although it was a soul dying, and not 
a body. It is not the function of art to take 



NOVEL-READING. 81 

US into a clinic or dissecting-room, even if the 
material dealt with is spiritual rather than 
physical. Stories of this kind show us how a 
soul may go to pieces, just as a body may go 
to pieces, — in either instance as the effects of 
disease. 

In contrast, consider the story of "Adam Bede.^^ 
This is a great, great work of art. It does not 
sicken us or make us shudder. It is the struggle 
of healthy, natural man portrayed for us there. 
In the writings of George Eliot, it is the average 
human nature, not the abnormal "freak,'^ that 
we have delineated for us. Where there is sin 
or crime, you see the effort to rise above it — to 
get beyond it. We come from the perusal of such 
literature as from a new baptism. It makes us 
feel as if, in spite of the evil everywhere, it 
would be worth our while to rush out in the 
effort to conquer it, in the faith that mankind 
may outlive it and pass above it. 

It would seem as if many of our leading writers 
feel that the stock of subjects for the novel has 
been nearly exhausted. They are searching the 
length and breadth of the land for a new theme 
or a new situation. Hopeless of dealing still 
with the universal elements of human nature, 



82 NOVEL-READING. 

such as formed the material for Shakspere, they 
look to the sporadic, the exceptional, the abnor- 
mal. They know that such themes will be inex- 
haustible; because, while there is one average 
human nature, there may be ten thousand abnor- 
mal, degenerate variations. 

This search for new themes shows a shocking 
want of originality. The old writers who were 
masters in their art were not perplexed from the 
lack of novelty. They were quite willing to use 
the same subject-material over and over again. 
For a hundred years the dramatists of Greece 
worked upon the same few stories gathered out 
of the great epic of Homer. The great painters 
of the Renaissance endlessly repeated the same 
theme. They felt no lack of opportunity in ever 
trying anew at the face of the Christ-child or the 
Madonna. What if there is a wearisome monot- 
ony in the works of those masters ? Have we 
anything in the "novelties'^ of the present day 
which can be compared with them ? 

Disease is not a normal subject for art, whether 
it be disease of the body or disease of the soul. 
It belongs to science — either to the science of 
medicine, including physiology, or else to some 
branch of the science of psychology. Normal, 



NOVEL-READING. 83 

healthy human nature can always furnish subject- 
material for real genius or originality. Con- 
trast, for instance, some of these " pathological 
studies/' such as ^^The Heavenly Twins/' ^^Tess/' 
or ^^The Damnation of Theron Ware/' with such 
stories as "Eudder Grange/' by Stockton, and 
" The Lady of the Aroostook/' by Howells. In 
that story by Stockton we have a charming 
picture, giving us in exquisite comedy a study of 
the trials and tribulations, the joys and sorrows, 
of early married life. I wish every man and 
woman on the face of the earth could read that 
novel. There is no pathology there. It is just 
a delightful story. From the day when the two 
young people launched out in their housekeep- 
ing experiment in a canal-boat, along with their 
extraordinary and most original " domestic " and 
their quaint '' boarder," down to their final exper- 
iment in rural life on a farm, it is a masterpiece. 
The fact that such stories can be written shows 
that subject-material is not exhausted; but that 
there is a transient decline in literary genius in 
the tendency to reach out wildly for the gro- 
tesque, the fantastic, the abnormal. A few such 
stories as "One Summer," by Blanche Willis 
Howard, "All Sorts and Conditions of Men/' by 



84 E^OVEL-KEADING. 

Walter Besant^ "Mrs. Lex and Mrs. AlesMne," 
by Stockton^ "Debit and Credit/^ by Freitag, 
"The Else of Silas Lapham/^ by W. D. Howells, 
are worth a whole library of such literature as 
" The Heavenly Twins/' " The Damnation of 
Theron Ware/' and the nauseating tales of 
Zola. 

Much of the so-called " realism '' that we are 
being deluged with in art and literature now-a- 
days is rather a form of perverted idealism. It 
gives us actual facts or experiences, but does not 
show them in their true relationship to other 
facts or experiences, and so affects us rather 
with a sense of unreality. Some of the so-called 
idealists impress me as much more truly realistic 
in their methods, giving a more genuine picture 
of actual reality, than the "realists'' themselves. 
We are getting tired of art without a soul behind 
it or a soul at the centre of it. A novel can be 
a mere splash of color, just as much as a so-called 
painting. 

The kind of idealism that I like to recognize 
in a story is the kind that seems always to show 
the author in sympathy with the characters he 
is describing. Not that he rewards his good 
characters or punishes his bad ones ; nor that he 



NOYEL-READING. 85 

makes you '' like '' all his diaracters, — but you 
can feel the touch of sympathy on his part even 
where he makes you despise the people he is 
sketching for you. Your respect for the dignity 
of human nature continues just the same whether 
you are touched by the humor, the evil, or the 
pathos. This is why I prefer Howells, for in- 
stance, to Zola. The one seems in love with 
human nature in spite of its weaknesses and 
eccentricities ; while the other seems to have a 
perverted contempt for it. Both are realists ; yet 
how unlike they are ! There is keen, warm, pro- 
found sympathy manifested in the writings of 
Howells. While he makes us pity the weaknesses 
of men and women, somehow he never lets us 
despise our common human nature. It is realism 
portrayed by a healthy, normal vision, which ap- 
preciates the fact that there is always a soul in 
"things natural.'' Some of his novels, for this 
reason, I have read many times. 

There is another form of idealistic realism 
that may be equally impressive, although we have 
to be much more on our guard lest we be misled 
by it. I have in mind, for example, such a work 
as "Les Miserables,'' by Victor Hugo. This 
might be be called a "romantic'' realism. There 



86 NOVEL-READING. 

never were such types of men as " Javert" and 
"Jean Valjean." They are creations pure and 
simple, out of the fancy of the author — not 
creations in the sense in which we would apply 
the term to the characters of Thackeray or Haw- 
thorne, but rather as giving us motive forces in 
combinations such as we should never come upon 
in real life. The combinations are unreal. Such 
persons never could have existed. But the 
portrayal of the workings of each motive force 
may be thoroughly true. The conscience-motive, 
for instance, as shown in the evolution of charac- 
ter in "Jean Valjean,^^ is wholly true to human 
nature, real and genuine to the last degree. The 
two types of duty, contrasted in the two charac- 
ters, "Javert '' and "Jean Valjean,'' are types such 
as we see around us every day. In fact, they are 
the two eternal types. And therefore I look upon 
" Les Miserables '' as a great work of art. It is 
a genuine picture of the forces at work in human 
nature, although, perhaps, too much disguised by 
"romance.'' When a writer who is not a genius 
tries this method he becomes erratic in the ex- 
treme — until we have such a ludicrous picture 
as " The Count of Monte Christo,'' by Dumas, so 
popular everywhere with boys. 



NOVEL-REAI)IN"G. S7 

I have been speaking of the novel chiefly 
as a means of diversion or amusement to the 
mind, as if, when reading it, we were indulging 
in a form of play. Even if we read from this 
standpoint it would be legitimate and natural. 
Perhaps the novel of to-day, with its peculiar 
characteristics, has led people more and more to 
read from this attitude, as if solely for the sake 
of diversion, until many cultivated people would 
be rather ashamed of owning to a decided taste 
for this form of literature. 

And yet, art is art ; and, if it is true art, then 
our indulgence in it will always mean something 
more than play. Comedy may be as profound 
as tragedy. 

When thinking of the great masters of this 
type of literature, I always link them with my 
thoughts of Shakspere. Alas for the person who 
would have a lurking shame at being devoted to 
the writings of George Eliot ! We may get as 
much for our higher culture, for the development 
of mind and heart, for the enrichment of our 
whole intellectual or spiritual nature, by reading 
the story of ^^ Maggie Tulliver'' or ^^Eelix Holt^^ 
as from reading Dante or Plato, Emerson or Dar- 
win, Pascal or Goethe. I make a plea for this 



88 NOVEL-READIITG. 

higher form of literature, therefore, not as a 
mere panacea to the mind, but as a means for the 
highest culture we may be capable of. 

Perhaps the best means of distinguishing 
between what we would call the entertaining 
story and the work of actual genius, would be in 
recognizing that the genius creates characters^ 
while the ordinary writer giyes us interesting sit- 
uations, picturesque moods, or striking dialogues. 
When you think of Thackeray, it is not the titles 
of his novels or certain special situations which 
occur to you. You may even have forgotten the 
titles. It is rather the names of the characters 
that begin to arise before you. It will be " Becky 
Sharp,^^ ^^ Major Pendennis," "Amelia,'^ "Colonel 
Newcomb,^' and many others. They seem to you 
like living men and women with whom you 
may have been intimately acquainted, or whose 
characters have come before you for your closest 
scrutiny. You may not remember just what 
those persons said or did in the stories. But the 
people themselves — what they were — left an 
impression that cannot be effaced. 

So is it with most of the characters in the 
stories of Charles Dickens. You may have to 
think twice in order to recall in which one of the 



NOYEL-READI^^^G. 89 

novels you find ^^Wilkins Micawber"; yet the 
name, like the name of " Sam Weller/' will be 
as immortal in literature as that of Napoleon 
Bonaparte in history. When you think of Haw- 
thorne, what comes to your mind ? Suppose I 
mention to you '^ The Marble Faun.'^ Is it this, 
that or the other scene which rises before you ? 
No ; I fancy that what comes to your mind will 
be the names of "Hilda/^ ^^Donatello/^ "Miriam/^ 
and others. Just so would it be with " The Scarlet 
Letter''— you think of ^^Arthur Dimmesdale'' 
and "Hester/' In these great writers you have 
an overwhelming sense of what the persons were^ 
rather than of what they did or said. 

Consider, in contrast, a lighter class of stories — 
interesting, charming in their way, pleasant to 
read, soothing to moods, just adapted for relaxing 
the mind. I mention the author of " Marcella." 
You will think at once what I mean. Mrs. 
Humphrey Ward does not create characters ; she 
gives us striking situations, interesting pictures 
of the struggle going on in the industrial and 
religious world. "Eobert Elsmere" is of less 
consequence as a man than in the tendencies he 
represents in the new phases of religious life. 
Take away the religious aspect from the story 



90 NOVEL-READING. 

and little or nothing would be left there. Ee- 
move the pictures of the social and industrial 
struggle going on in England, and what would 
be left to "Marcella^^? 

The Great Masters who can create characters ! 
They leave us a heritage of immortal worth. 
Again and again those lines have come back to 
me from Emerson, where he says : 

'* If Thought unlock her mysteries, 
If Friendship on me smile, 
I walk in marble galleries, 
I talk with kings the while." 

This is our true experience when reading over 
and over again the stories of the great writers, 
the novelists I have mentioned. We are affected 
very much as the mind of the scientist must be 
affected when at last he unravels some of the 
secrets of Nature and feels his whole being 
flooded with new light from the deeper interpre- 
tation he can put upon reality. 

In so far as our ordinary life is concerned, we 
never can see the truly real, because we cannot 
see the incidents occurring to us in their complete 
relationship. We can never know a single friend 
through and through, as we can know the charac- 



NOVEL-READIKG. 91 

ters of Dickens or Hawthorne. There is some- 
thing supremely solemn in this close insight we 
are getting into the secrets of human nature. 
When the pictures given us are in a normal 
perspective in the story, the whole character is 
before us, not just one small part of it. Some- 
times, for this reason, I am inclined to put the 
works of George Eliot as superior even to those 
of Shakspere. In her portrayal of human nature 
she seems at times to be unraveling the mysteries 
of deity. It is one characteristic of the genius 
in any form of literature, but especially in the 
novel, that the genius does not nourish our preju- 
dices, but makes us more perfectly human and 
sympathetic. How hard it is to detect a preju- 
dice in Shakspere ! And this is true of the great 
coterie of novelists whom I have named. The 
petty writer, with his eyes fixed so close to the 
scene he is describing that he cannot see it in any 
other relationship, is full of his prejudices, and 
nourishes them in us at the same time. But who, 
for example, could make out from the writings 
of Hawthorne or George Eliot just what religious 
beliefs they held, any more than you could make 
out the religious theories of Shakspere from his 
dramas ! 



92 ]SrOVEL-KEADI]SrG. 

Tlie pity of it is that we do most of our novel- 
reading when we are yery young, before we are 
out of our teens. And then, as a rule, our atten- 
tion is, more than anything else, on the love-tale 
or the love-motive. We do not see the book as a 
complete work of art. We read it and lay it aside 
for another, and then for another, until all that 
we have read becomes loosely fused into one 
general vague impression. I have wondered if 
we would not get more of the higher culture from 
novel-reading if there were as limited an amount 
of this form of literature as there is of poetry. 
In order to value the worth of a poem we must 
have read it over and over again. This is almost 
equally true in reference to the great novels. 

It would be worth our while if we could read 
a few of these classic works anew every few years. 
They would mean something quite different to us 
each time. I remember some one telling me how 
he had laughed and laughed over the humor of 
'' Don Quixote " when reading it before he was 
out of his teens ; and then how, years later, when 
again he read it, it was impossible for him to keep 
back the tears from his eyes. In the first read- 
ing it was merely a humorous tale. In the second 
reading it was a profound portrayal of the weak- 



NOYEL-READIKG. 93 

nesses of our human nature, as they exist now-a- 
days as much as in the time of Cervantes. 

How many, likewise, have read ^^ Vanity Eair^^ 
when quite young, and been struck mainly by 
its humor, seeing it only as the story of a clever 
parvenu. Then, perhaps, they have read it ten or 
fifteen or twenty years later, — and what another 
story it seemed ! How it cut us to the heart to 
feel that Thackeray was showing us the actual 
world we live in, and what a world of illusions 
it is, where we go chasing baubles or pursuing 
phantoms, letting that which is of most value 
slip out of our grasp ! " Vanity Fair ^^ is the '^ Don 
Quixote ^^ of the Nineteenth Century, showing us 
the world of illusions, where people cling to the 
notion that they can get happiness without earn- 
ing it, never waking up to see their mistake, but 
in their failure calling everything "vanity.'^ 

If only we had time to read over, again and 
again, such a work as ^^Don Quixote '' or "Vanity 
Fair,'^ as the Greek read his Homer ! But we 
sacrifice the classic for the ephemeral; and in 
doing so make the heaviest of all sacrifices, — 
abandon our own spiritual culture. 

No great work of art of any kind — whether 
sculpture, music, painting, or the novel — can 



94 NOVEL-READING. 

exert its true influence upon us unless we liave 
viewed it, or listened to it, or read it, a number 
of times and in different moods, or at different 
epochs in our lives. Art does not have the right 
sort of elevating effect upon us at the present 
time, because we are not able to hold our attention 
long enough upon any one great work, so that it 
may secure a firm and lasting hold upon us. We 
may be trying to cultivate twenty different sides 
of our nature, and in that very effort fail to cul- 
tivate any side at all. The very necessity we are 
under at the present time of "keeping up'^ with 
ephemeral literature is lowering the standard of 
literature. Our culture is becoming so diffused 
as to be almost no culture at all. 

I am not sure but that the multiplicity of free 
libraries may be doing almost as much harm as 
good, because of this one mistake which they 
encourage in our methods for culture. People 
are getting out of the habit of owning books ; and 
yet you can never get much out of a book unless 
you own it ; unless you can ha,ve it lying about 
on your table, or on your mantel, where you can 
pick it up and read it at odd moments, or go back 
to it in varying moods. A small private library 
of books bought volume by volume from what we 



NOVEL-READING. 95 

have saved through, sacrificing other pleasures, 
may have more value to us than having access to 
a library of a hundred thousand volumes where 
those volumes do not belong to us. It is strange 
that we lay out so much for our houses, so much 
for pictures, so much for our table, for the pleas- 
ures that lose their significance the instant they 
are over, and so little for the library which can 
nourish the mind and give peace to the heart. 

Any book that is worth reading twice should 
be owned — no matter how great the sacrifice one 
has to make in order to possess it. And any 
book that is really a work of art is worth read- 
ing twice, or many times, and we do not get the 
value of it until we have done so. 




THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 



7 

Philip S. Thacheb. 



If the chosen soul could never be alone 
In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God, 
No greatness ever had been dreamed or done. 
Among dull hearts a prophet never grew ; 
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude. 

— Lowell, 

Beauty — a living presence of the earth, 

Surpassing the most fair ideal forms 

Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed 

From earth's materials — waits upon my steps; 

Pitches her tent before me as I move, 

An hourly neighbor. Paradise, and groves 

Elysian, Fortunate Fields — like those of old 

Sought in the Atlantic main — w^hy should they be 

A history only of departed things. 

Or a mere fiction of what never was ? 

For the discerning intellect of man, 

When wedded to this goodly universe 

In love and holy passion, shall find these 

A simple produce of the common day. 

—Wordsworth. 

Into thy calm eyes, O Nature, I look and rejoice; 
Prayerful, I add my one note to the Infinite voice, 
As shining and singing and sparkling glides on the 

glad day, 
And eastward the swift-rolling planet wheels into the 

gray. ^ Celia Thaxter, 

(98) 



THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 



NATURE, as her name indicates, is always about 
to be born. How quietly her face is renewed, 
and tbe Spring and Summer brought forth ! Only 
a few weeks ago, and the rippling laugh of the 
streams was held fast in the embrace of the frost, 
the trees, like skeletons, cracked in the intense 
cold, the plants lay torpid beneath the hard earth, 
unbroken silence reigned in wood and grove, in 
whose sheltered nooks the snow lingered. The 
fierce blast from the North chilled us as it rolled 
through cloudy worlds of sleet or sighed its mel- 
ancholy crescendo through the pines. But when 
the soft gales from the South began to blow, a 
quickening power grasped the life which was 
stored in seeds and roots, and elevated it through 
myriad conduits of branchy twig and stalk, and 



100 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 

the early blossoms began to call the bees from 
their winter's sleep, while the arbntus sent up the 
first breath of fragrance from under the leaves. 
Sunbeams melted the ice and snow into music, 
which sang in the rills as they danced towards 
the sea, and decked the rocks with a green dress 
of moss and lichen. The waving trees were 
thrown into quivering joy as the timid buds 
tried to unfold in the morning breeze, while the 
hilltops caught and reflected the far-off smile of 
the sun. The birds, full of rapturous songs, 
made the woods ring with their melodies and the 
quiet air vibrate with their happy notes. The 
gardens were brightened as crocuses and tulips 
began to peep and nod, each day giving birth to 
more. Soon the orchards beamed with prolonged 
delight in the blooms that foretold a fruitful 
Autumn, every woodland glade unfolded revela- 
tions of beauty, and wild-flowers brightened the 
banks of the rivers. The sun, like a great scene- 
painter, was busy coloring the changeable drapery 
which decks the dome above. Here, he spread 
his dazzling fleeces ; there, he tinged the floating 
curtains ; yonder, he rolled up his black shrouds 
of rain and thunder. The clouds lay languidly 
on the sky in delicate forms and opalescent hues^ 



THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 101 

like soft islets in a great sea of nnfatlioniable 
splendor. 

Who can see this resurrection fiat sweep 
over the whole of Nature, and not sing, with 
Lowell, — 

" Now is the high- tide of the year ! 
And whatever of life hath ebbed away 
Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer, 
Into every bare inlet and creek and bay. 

No matter how barren the past may have been, 
'Tis enough for us now that leaves are green; 
We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing 
That skies are clear and grass is growing." 

To the great poets, Nature looks radiant with 
a divine beauty, as love lights up the face of a 
friend. The heavens are filled with starry fire, 
the earth clothed in magnificence, and the flowers 
robed in fairer raiment than imperial Solomon 
ever wore. The royal hills decked with trees, 
the orchards that glorify a thousand plains, the 
vineyards that purple the gentle slopes, the 
grandeur and solemn silence of forest depths, 
the ripple or roar of the sea, the stupendous 
mountains that lift themselves up to heaven like 



102 THE SIGHT OF NATUKE. 

the earth stretching out her hands in prayer, are 
symbols and types of that which lies beneath, 
suggesting to the spiritual sense a glory which 
eye hath not seen, but which overflows the visible 
like a tideless ocean, and in which it is lost as 
vapor in the sun. 

Of the average man it may be said, as Words- 
worth wrote, — 

*'A primrose by the river's brim 
A yellow primrose is to him, 
And it is nothing more." 

He has eyes, but they see not, because blinded 
with the dust of life, and his spirit is starving 
amidst a banquet of splendor at which a thousand 
angels would find enough and to spare. How 
different with Wordsworth himself, when he 
said, — 

"I have learned 
To look on Nature not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth. . . . 

I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 



THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 103 

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

Yet, for his lack of sight, the average man is 
more to be pitied than condemned, because he 
has not had his eyes opened to Nature — he 
needs the culture of poet and painter. In such 
a case it is not wilful unseeing, but lack of 
understanding how to see. 

When once we begin to enter into sympathy 
with Nature we realize why, to the poets, every 
natural thing is so pregnant with significance. 
It is because " God ^s in matter everywhere.'' 

'' He murmurs near the running brooks 
A sweeter music than their own." 

It is because the spirit in ourselves is akin to 
the Spirit in Nature that in all common things 
around us we become aware of the present deity. 
To the appreciative soul everything has a voice, 
and speaks ! — 

*' Every blade of grass that springs; 
Every cool worm that crawls, content as the eagle on 
soaring wings ; 



104 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 

Every summer's day instinct with life; every dawn 
when from waking bird 

And morning hum of the bee a chorus of praise is 
heard ; 

Every gnat that sports in the sun for his little life of 
a day; 

Every flower that opens its cup to the dews of a per- 
fumed May." 

But it is difficult to see the great in what is 
near^ the divine in what is ordinary ; because, 
in order to understand the spiritual meanings 
of common things we need to be ourselves 
spiritual; and the worldly mind is strong with- 
in us. 

You will hear people making much ado about 
a rare and costly orchid, who never think of 
bestowing any attention upon the wonderful- 
ness of the dandelion. You will find others 
excited about the beauty of a diamond, who 
have never cared to watch the rain-drops glisten- 
ing in the light. You will find still others 
fluttered about the appearance of a comet, who 
have bestowed scarcely a thought upon the 
unutterable glories of the heavens under which 
they nightly walk. You will find people long- 
ing to see the great sights of foreign lands, who 



THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 106 

are heedless of the wonders to be seen from 
their own doors in the ever-changing scenery of 
the clouds, in the wealth of trees and flowers, 
in the rising and setting sun. 

It is not beauty that is wanting in the scenery 
around us ; it is the seeing eye. It needed only 
the sight of a field-daisy to stir the heart of 
Eobert Burns, it needed only the nodding of 
the daffodil to wake the muse of Wordsworth, 
because these poets had the seeing eye. 

With profound insight Lowell sings: 

** Thou seest no beauty save thou make it first; 
Man, woman, Kature, each is but a glass 
In which man sees the image of himself." 

And a similar thought is in Shakspere : 

'* The jewel that we find, we stop and take it 
Because we see it; but what we do not see 
We tread upon, and never think of it." 

In his "Ode on Dejection,^^ Coleridge tells us 
that, in looking at the world, 

" We receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone doth Nature live; 
Ours is the wedding-garment, ours the shroud." 



106 THE llGHT OF MATURE. 

Then lie assures us that if, in Nature, we 
would see 

"Aught of higher worth, 
From the soul itself must issue forth 
A light, a glory, a fair luminous mist 
Enveloping the earth." 

Society is full of fever and complexity, of 
contrivance, pretense, and bustle. Everything 
there speaks of ambition, care, disappointment, 
or of luxury and empty display. But, at times, 
we who have been harassed by social conditions, 
pierced by envious arrows, stung by poisonous 
tongues, and bruised by the cast-iron hearts 
amidst which our own have been tossed, have 
gone, wearied and oppressed by the world^s 
stifling atmosphere, into the stillness of Nature, 
her sublimity and tenderness, until the earth has 
seemed like an undestroyed Paradise saturated 
with the Divine Presence. In the cool of the 
day we have almost expected to hear the voice 
of God break the spell and audibly speak his 
will in the oracles of bird, breeze and blossom. 
We have felt, as never before, 

*' The simple, the sincere delight. 
The habitual scene of hill and dale, 



THE SIGHT OF NATURE. lOf 

The rural herds, the vernal gale, 
The tangled vetches' purple bloom, 
The fragrance of the bean's perfume." 

And if, from the solitary sea, or the summit of 
a mountain, we have looked up into the dark 
depths of night, and felt 

** The silence that is in the starry sky. 
The sleep that is among the lonely hills," 

we have been introduced to 

'' That blessed mood 
In which the burthen of the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world 
Is lightened." 

And not alone in the familiar scenes and 
landscapes at our very hand is the sight of 
Nature powerful for our uplifting and calming. 
If we have ever gazed upward through the won- 
derful instrument of the astronomer, upon those 
bright worlds throbbing in the great depths of 
space like the happy thoughts of the unwearied 
God, we have seen awful but splendid things. 
a 'VVorlds on worlds are rolling ever.'^ A hundred 
million come within the range of the telescope, 



108 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 

and there are millions more so inconceivably 
distant that their light, though traveling at the 
rate of 186,000 miles per second, takes hundreds 
of years to reach this earth. If they were ex- 
tinguished this instant the inhabitants of earth 
for hundreds of years would still see their light 
shining. Some of these vv^orlds are so large that 
in comparison with them ours is but as an atom 
compared with a mountain. 

Ponderous as these enormous bodies are, grav- 
itation hangs them in space like enormous balls. 
And all are rushing forward three times faster 
than the swiftest locomotive, and some of them 
more rapidly than a cannon-ball. Though jour- 
neying, as to time, "from creation to decay,'^ 
they never travel the same path twice. Some 
have gone out, like watch-fires burned out on 
eternal hills ; and others are in the process of 
making. Some have a heat so fierce that if a 
column of ice forty miles in diameter were pro- 
jected into them with the velocity of light, it 
would all melt as it passed in. Amid the fiery 
atmosphere of some, there are storms which 
rage with the velocity of more than a hundred 
miles per second,—- storms compared with which 
our fiercest tornadoes are but as the breath of a 



THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 109 

summer zephyr. There are clouds which pour 
down upon certain worlds torrents of molten 
metal, as rain descends on our earth, while 
lurid masses of flaming hydrogen rise like vast 
tongues to a height of hundreds of thousands 
of miles. With the pyrheliometer we can read 
the temperature of these worlds, and study 
their history as revealed in the living lines of 
light which emanate from their glowing photo- 
spheres. 

According to Professor Stokes, the light-waves 
throb in the ethereal fluid with a velocity equal 
to eight times the distance around the earth in 
a single second. The spectroscope enables us to 
catch a beam of light and spread it out into a 
band of exquisite colors, and also reveals the 
pure tints out of which are woven the glory 
of the gorgeous sunsets, the thousand tinted 
flowers, the gay plumage of birds, the sparkle 
of the diamond, — and even the flash of the 
coal flre, which is nothing but imprisoned light 
let loose. These light-waves ripen the apple, 
but do not shake it from the bough ; they paint 
the rose a blushing red, without visibly moving 
it ; they cover the rocks with moss and lichen, 
without wearing them away. According to Lord 



110 THE SIGHT OF KATURE. 

Kelvin, what are called the "Eontgen rays" 
send out seventy quadrillions of vibrations per 
second. At the rate of one hundred counts per 
minute, it would take more than one billion, 
three hundred million years to count the vibra- 
tions of a single second. Yet no ear can catch 
a sound of their music as they flow in the gray 
of dawn and reflect ripples of amber and gold. 
How eminently fitted to symbolize him " who cov- 
ereth himself with light as with a garment " ! 

And how much is here, in the contemplation 
of all this marvel and splendor and power in 
Nature, which should calm our littleness and 
exalt our reverence and our aspiration ! 

"Fairer grows the earth each morning 

To the eyes that watch aright. 
Every dew-drop sparkles warning 

Of a miracle in sight, 
Of some unsuspected glory 

Waiting in the old and plain. 
Poet's dream nor traveler's story 

Words such wonders as remain. 

"Everywhere the gate of Beauty 
Fresh across the pathway swings, 
As we follow truth or duty 
Inward to the heart of things ; 



THE SIGHT OF NATURE. Ill 

And we enter, foolish mortals, 
Thinking now the heart to find, — 

There to gaze on vaster portals I 
Still the Glory lies behind ! " 



We have glanced at the infinitely large. If 
we look at Nature through the microscope we 
shall be impressed with the exquisite beauty 
and perfection of the infinitely little. Think 
of creatures, endowed with life and motion, so 
small that we inhale millions of them every 
day and do not know it. Tens of thousands of 
them could live and move in the water which 
floats on the surface of your eye, and yet cause 
you no inconvenience. These minute careering 
creatures avoid or come in contact with one 
another; have heart, lungs, blood, corpuscles in 
that blood; and feed, and propagate. In every 
room, not myriads only, but billions exist. And 
in the midst of them, as in the center of a 
cyclone of whirling atoms, we move and work. 

Even what we call '' matter ^' is ever dancing, 
never at rest. According to Professor Tait, in 
a mass of hydrogen every particle has on an 
average 17,700,000,000 collisions per second with 
other particles. In every second its course is 



112 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 

wholly changed 17,700,000,000 times. And the 
particle itself moves at the rate of seventy miles 
in a minute. The number of particles in a cubic 
inch of air^ in the ordinary state of the atmos- 
phere, is approximately represented by a figure 
3 with twenty ciphers after it. The diameter 
of a particle is not very different from one 
250-millionth part of an inch. 

The beauty of the infinitely little is, in other 
directions, no less marked and interesting. If 
through a powerful microscope we examine one 
of the tiny plumes of a butterfly's wing, we 
shall see a perfection of color that will make 
the richest hues of the artist look wan and defy 
the tracing of the subtlest brush. Or, if we 
take a little seed and watch it after it has been 
covered with earth, we shall see it grow larger 
every day by attracting to itself gaseous elements 
from the soil, air, sun, and moisture. These 
atoms travel to the very spot in the growing 
organism where they are needed to form the 
right substance and pattern of the root, stalk, 
flower, and fresh seed, and arrange themselves 
in such wonderful ways that it almost seems as 
though each atom was intelligent and saw its 
proper place. 



THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 113 

Equally wonderful with the energy within 
vegetable life is the energy that surrounds our- 
selves. When a cyclone tears the forest from 
its roots, or an earthquake destroys a city, we 
see the effect of destructive forces. But these 
are weak compared with those silent forces 
whose presence the finest ears cannot detect and 
whose secret only the acutest intellects can 
interpret. A drop of water, for example, — a 
single dew-drop, the morning bath of the lily, the 
drink of the humming-bird from the floweret's 
cup, quivering in our sight for a moment and 
then scattered by an insect's flight or brushed 
away by a breath of air, — is, according to Pro- 
fessor Faraday, the sheath of electric force 
sufiicient to charge eight hundred thousand 
Ley den jars. 

So is it everywhere, in earth and air. From 
whatever point of view, there is a fascination 
which enthralls us as we look at Nature. The 
simplest thing is deeper than our fathoming 
and higher than our measurement. And this, 
because filled with the unsearchable and incom- 
prehensible God. 

*' He hides within the lily 
A strong and tender care, 



114 THE SIGHT OF NATUBE. 

That wins the earth-born atoms 
To glory of the air. 

** That pebble is older than Adam I 
Secrets it hath to tell; 
These rocks — they cry out history, 
Could I but listen well. 

** That pool knows the ocean-feeling 
Of storm and moon-led tide ; 
The sun finds its East and West therein, 
And the stars find room to glide. 

** That lichen's crinkled circle 
Creeps with the Life Divine, 
Where the Holy Spirit loitered 
On its way to this face of mine. 

*' I can hear these violets chorus 

To the sky's benediction above : — 
And we all are together lying 
On the bosom of Infinite Love." 



Moreover, feel that the universe is centralized 
by God, and all tenderness will grow tenderer, 
all terrors will grow mild, and all splendors will 
improve. When we see God in all, and under- 
stand our relationship to all, there is no flower 
whose beauty we may not share, not a leaping 
stream whose merry dance we may not join, not 



THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 115 

a tree robing itself in riclier life wMcli we may 
not enjoy^ not a cloud sailing in tlie blue ocean 
of the sky with whose peaceful spirit we may 
not be borne along ! The joy of the whole cre- 
ation is ours, and the consciousness that 

** Everywhere his splendor shineth." 

In these ^^ times of refreshing'' God gives him- 
self. Heaven opens to the open soul. Over the 
barrenest places of life there spreads a robe of 
summer green ; in the night of sorrow the stars 
of hope shine. 

In a word, we walk about the world like 
children in the hoTnestead, 

Many a time during "vacation days/' if our 
hearts are open and receptive, may consciousness 
of this fact arise within us to bless us. The 
universe becomes ours. We are part and parcel 
of it all ; owners of it all. It has been given to 
ns. It is ours to enjoy; it is ours to grow in. 

With such sight of Nature as this, and such 
apprehension of "partnership" in it with the 
Divine Spirit permeating it all, we shall enter 
into the gracious meaning which it has for us 
as we have never before done. When we sit on 
the cliff overhanging the sea, and look on the 



116 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 

majesty and mystery of the shimmering waters, 
or listen to the monotonous plash of the wave- 
lets as they kiss the sand, or hear the thunderous 
anthem of the billows when old ocean is up in 
his angry might and the waters leap together 
with the noise and exultation of charging armies ; 
or if we go into the mountains, and see the 
grandeur that sits upon their brow when every 
summit is like an altar flaming to the skies, or 
watch them when the moon rises calm and holy, 
bathing their slopes with tender stillness and 
cleansing light 5 or if we penetrate into the 
heart of the forest and sit beneath the trees, 
with the wind so wild and the air so pure, and 
take in large draughts of health and strength ; — 
whenever and wherever we '' lie down in green 
pastures" and walk "beside the still waters,'^ 
if our minds roam beyond things seen and 
temporal to things unseen and eternal, we shall 
understand why Bryant could write — 

*' To him who in the love of Mature holds 
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks 
A various language. For his gayer hours 
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile 
And eloquence of beauty ; and she glides 
Into his darker musings with a mild 



THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 117 

And healing sympathy that steals away 
Their sharpness ere he is aware." 

And when the golden rest-days have flown, 
and we return to the busy home and world, 
memory will furnish us with a collection of 
pictures such as no studio ever saw. We shall 
see again that dazzling sunrise whose crimson 
and gold are fadeless and make river and lake 
and sea a dream of fairy-land. We shall see 
the clouds trip up the feet of the nimble moon- 
beams and detain the silvery huntress from the 
chase. We shall see the solitary grandeur and 
sublime waste of mountains we have climbed. 
We shall see the stream as it creeps down the 
canon and purls over the pebbles, while babbling 
tales of coolness and purity. Pleasant glades 
and lonely glens will haunt the mind like a 
dream of heaven. Above all, we shall have 
gained 

"Attentive and believing faculties, 
To see and hear, and breathe the evidence. 
Of God's deep wisdom in the natural world." 

We shall be conscious that Nature abounds in 
well-springs of joy; that beauty and love make 
the air forever bright and warm. 



118 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 

" The voices of happy Nature, 
And the heavens' sunny gleam, 
Reprove thy sick heart's fancies, 
Upbraid thy foolish dream. 
Listen, and I v^ill tell thee 
The song creation sings. 
From the humming of bees in the heather 
To the flutter of angels' wings. 
An echo rings forever. 

The sound can never cease ; 
It speaks to God of glory. 
It speaks to earth of peace. 
Above thy peevish wailing 

Rises that holy song, — 
Above earth's foolish clamor. 
Above the voice of wrong. 
So leave thy sick heart's fancies. 

And lend thy willing voice 
To the sweet, sweet song of glory 
That bids the world rejoice." 




Books of Interest 



Geneva Series 

Of Attractive Booklets : : : 

Handsome in Form. Popular and Inspiring 
in Contents. 

"We especially commend these little books to 
young men and women for their uplifting influ- 
ence."— -^os^on Home Journal, 

The House Beautiful. By William C. Gannett 

Love Does It All. By Ida Lemon Hildyard 

The Happy Life. By Minot J. Savage 

Accepting Ourselves. By Arthur M. Tschudy 

The Home. By Phoebe M. Butler 

Culture without College. By William C. Gannett 

Serenity. By James H. West 

Beauty of Character. By Paul R. Frothingham 
The Quest of the Holy Grail. By Charles F. Bradley 

Home to the Ideal. By Frederic A. Hinckley 

** Beautiful and helpful. An inspiration to higher 
thinking and nobler liymg.— Journal of Education. 

Paper, choice edition, silk-stitched, white or 
tinted covers, put up in entitled envelopes, 15 
cents each. (Eight to one address for $1.00.) 

Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price, by 

J7^A\ES H. WEST, Publisher, BostOfi, Mass. 



Writings by William C Gannett 

THE HOUSE BEAUTirUL. 
Cloth, neatly stamped, 50 cents; white and gold 
edition, full gilt, in box, 75 cents. (Choice paper 
edition, white or tinted covers, silk- stitched, 15 
cents ; cheap paper edition, 6 cents.) 

CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 
Choice paper edition, white or tinted covers, silk- 
stitched, 15 cents ; cheap paper edition, 6 cents. 

GREEN PASTURES AND STILL WTTTERS. 
Three Favorite Poems. Printed from artist type, 
in colored ink, with cover-design and one illustra- 
tion. Paper, white or tinted covers, silk-stitched, 
price, 15 cents. 

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 
Paper, white or tinted covers, 10 cents. 

THE LITTLE CHILD AT THE BREAKEAST TABLE. 
By William and Mary Gannett. With original 
cover-design in colors. Paper, 20 cents. 



Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price, by 

JAMES H. WEST Publisher, Boston, Mass. 



^^ Life-Helps/^ ^ ^ 

Single copy, 6 cents. Ten copies assorted, 50 cents. 
Ten copies of any single issue, 30 cents. 

(*) Numbers marked with a star are at present out of print, 
and cannot be supplied. 

1. A Wayside Prophet, By Marion D. Shutteb 

2.* Making the Best of It, By Samuel M. Crothers 

3. The House Beautiful, By William C. Gannett 

4. Heart=Ache and Heart's^Ease, By Charles G. Ames 

5. Beauty of Character, By Paul R. Frothingham 
6 * What of a Day ? By Caroline J. Bartlett 
7.* Our Other Selves, By James H. West 
8 * Monuments of the Leaves, By Marion D. Shutter 
9.* Winter Fires, By James M. Leighton 

10. Culture without College, By William C. Gannett 

11. Accepting Ourselves, By Arthur M. Tschudy 

12. Enduring Hardness, By John W. Chadwick 

13. Unsatisfied Longings, By W. H. Savage 

14. Serenity, By James H. West 

15. From the Woods, By Caroline J. Bartlett 

16. Work and Rest, By John W. Chad wick 

17. The Home, By Phoebe M. Butler 

18. Will it be All the Same ? By Jenkin Lloyd Jones 

19. Home to the Ideal, By Frederic A. Hinckley 

20. The Quest of the Holy Qrail, By Charles F. Bradley 

21. The Seeing Eye, By B. H. Chapin 

22. Doing What We Can, By James Yila Blake 

23. The Happy Life, By Minot J. Savage 

24. Novel=Reading, By W. L. Sheldon 

25. The Sight of Nature, By Philip S. Thacher 

26. Love Does it All, By Ida Lemon Hildyard 

27. A Clue to the Meaning of Life, By Wm. M. Salter 

28. Self»Preservation, By Charles G. Ames 

Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price, by 

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